Colleges Teaching TESOL

Teaching english in ThailandBefore your first travel to Thailand, you will surely have different ideas and images about how teaching here would be. Well, as always, it doesn’t quite turn out to be the way you think. After taking the first step into your first thai classroom, you will be surprised how different it actually is and less easy than one had expected. The class sizes (at least in governmental schools) reach from 30 to 50 pupils and are not as disciplined as the stereotype of Asians would let one expect: the students sleep on their desk, play guitar and are kind of addicted to their cell phones if you don’t manage to be authoritative and command silence. It is normal for them to stand up to look at the notebook of a classmate or to walk out to go to toilet during the lesson. This doesn’t only occur in the lessons of foreign teachers, but thai teachers as well have to face these problems- even though not in the very same heaviness. The disparity between the foreign and the thai teacher simply occurs because of their different ways of teaching. english lessons hold by a thai are mostly ‘teacher centered’ and contain far less spoken english. The students are more relaxed, because they can understand the english of their teacher better –since he has a thai accent like them- and if a student doesn’t manage to ask/answer a question in english, he/she are finally allowed to speak their native language. A typical lesson is all about repeating and copying, students are seldom asked to present individual ideas; they are even shocked if the teacher selects only one of them to answer or speak out. The teacher reads out aloud a text of the course book sentence by sentence, using a microphone, the students listen and repeat in a chorus after him. Answering comprehension questions, the students use a cookie-cutter approach of trying to find the matching sentence in the text and then copy it, without really understanding the meaning. It seems to be really hard for them to filter the wanted information out of the provided text and to convert it to an answer. Since many students (especially the boys who prefer to sit in the back) lack proper english skills and are at times unable to master the given task, they just copy the answers from a fellow students, without actually understanding them. This is the easiest way for them, because if they -like mentioned above- lack basic knowledge of the english language they can’t follow the lesson and mostly give up trying, too. Other are simply too lazy to rework the not understood material. Furthermore, the motivation to learn and understand english is meagre like this quote of a student can underline: “Why should I learn english, I want to be a farmer”. That english is officially seen as ‘foreign language’ instead of ‘second language’ is rather counterproductive, because it gives the impression of english being a ‘scary, foreign’ language and a sign of colonization. The latter strongly interferes with their national pride for never being colonized. Therefore, if a foreign teacher steps into a classroom, he has to deal with student who are accustomed to copy everything they don’t understand from a classmate, have little self-confidence to speak english, thinking it is too difficult to learn constantly motivated and who have a hard time understanding a ‘Farang’ speaking english. Due to this, the teacher has to make his lesson as interesting, understandable and motivating as possible since the students are undisciplined if they don’t understand the lesson and start doing other, more interesting things or even stop attending the lesson. Questioning a few foreign teachers about their experience with thai student, the results were all pretty similar. One teacher was shocked by how little english (or still rather badly) many students can speak after encountering them for the first time. Another one told me that many students are undisciplined in lessons hold by a foreigner due to the fact that many foreign teachers often don’t have a strong influence on the grading. Since it is common that many foreigners teach especially conversation and share the classes with thai Co- teachers, they might only see their classes one time a week. What’s more, according to the knowledge of the questioned teachers, the class size is a major problem, because it makes it nearly impossible to teach a language really efficient. Asking one more teacher about thai students, he explained that in his experience the students are used to a ‘thai way of doing things’, their favorite saying is ‘mai bpen rai’- ‘No problem, never mind!’. Many thai teachers simply don’t care about poor behavior or don’t mind it so much. As a consequence a class held with the strict objective for the teacher to teach and the students to learn scares some students off; they stop to attend the lesson as it is too demanding for them. A mentionable point concerning this lack of discipline is probably the early learning where rules are rarely enforced with great consequences. On the surface the rules are proclaimed like for example the sign all around school saying “100 % requirement to wear a helmet”, but it is commonly accepted to drive without it. Helmets are put on rather seldom and actually mostly for the reason that police is around. Or the ‘no smoking law’ at the school ground, which is practically not very strictly followed, not even by all of the teachers. This issue can be related to the behavior in class since students tend to get the impression that rules, like attending lessons, doing their homework, etc. don’t have to be taken too seriously. However, the most critical point every teacher has to face is the lack of motivation working hard and especially individually for the acquisition of english for the simple reason that the school system in Thailand is designed to let every student pass. “If your whole class has to pass the exams, after some time, you just have to give up trying to make them work independent, you just let them copy” said a teacher resigning. It is a big problem that it is unlikely for students not to pass. If they fail any exam, they can retake it twice, if they then still not manage to get a pass, they have to learn the failed subject additionally in the next term. It is simply not usual to repeat a class. However, asking the head of the english department of a governmental school about this, I got the answer that most thai teachers simply don’t give this grade or enjoining weak students to do assignments for extra points, which prevents them from receiving zero points. As a result many students have the attitude: ‘Why should I learn, I will pass anyway’. This deadens the competitive behavior of learning pretty much since there is no real reason for egoistic competition. To put it in a nutshell, the most common problems and difficulties are the lack of discipline and motivation, the being unaccustomed to work and think independent- minded, the fear of actually speaking the language out loud, the problem for the students to understand foreigners speaking english, the habit to just copy from each other if they don’t understand something and especially the being used to english lessons containing a huge amount of their mother tongue. Lastly now a quote, which underlines the average attitude of thai people towards learning english: “Taking english as its second official language might lead to misunderstandings that Thailand had been colonized in the past”. This quote was indeed said by the Minister of Education Chinnaworn Boonyakiat.