Training Thais to Teach Thai

[Guest]

I’m in the position at the moment of interviewing literally dozens of Thai teachers to teach courses to start next month.

I put an ad in the Bangkok Post and the response has been overwhelming after just three days. It saddens me a great deal to know that there are so many Thais struggling to find work and that they are willing to commute ridiculously long distances to do it.

This post though is really about my disappointments with the lack of ability that Thai teachers seem to have ( I guess I half expected it)

After a short interview, I will hand them about half a dozen plastic fruits – mango, pineapple, water-melon, etc, and ask them to imagine I am a complete beginner. They must teach me for 10 minutes on the topic of ‘Thai fruit’ and branch out to teach me anything they deem fit.

Without fail, 90% of the teachers just lecture me and give me cultural background which I don’t need and certainly don’t want. Sadly, this is all a direct result of their own inadequate education system where they just sit in class and listen to the teacher drone on day after day.

After I stop them, I praise their good points (even if I have to lie) and then show them how I want it done – using communicative methods. I’d love you to see their reaction. It’s like a whole new world has opened up to them – a whole new approach to teaching that they never thought existed. It’s been a great joy to share it with them.

I’m very worried I must admit, when I think about some of the lessons you guys must be having. It must be terribly frustrating to just sit there and be lectured and be dying for the chance to speak. Thais in general simply do not know how to teach effectively. In many ways it is because they are over-respectful and feel embarrassed at getting students to act out silly role-plays and play language games but it’s all part of the language learning process.

It’s going to be a massive job for me to train these teachers because it’s going to be like teaching dogs to become cats but it has to be done.

[Guest]

Phil

I totally agree about your comments on Thai teaching methods. One worrying trend I noticed while teaching some Prathom 2/3 kids at a summer school recently.

They seem to associate English words with the Thai equivalent and not know that only the first part of the couplet is required.

For instance point to 5 and you get the chorus Five Ha, a flashcard of a fish gets Fish plaa etc. I consequently had huge difficulty getting inteligble sentences from them. They have massive vocabulary but seem never to have been taught how to string it all together.

On meeting the teacher it all became clear, a charming fellow, rather light on his feet and certainly not my first choice to leave my kids with. However he had the most strange ideas about how to teach English, rote learning and drill are all he seems to use.

I'll look on the bright side and rest assured that there will be plenty of post school students for me in the future. The dark side is that all the bad habits will be well entrenched by then.

I did get my own back on the mincer though. When he said "I not finish" I told him in front of his colleagues that I was perfectly aware he was not born in Finland.

[Guest]

coquet,

What really amazes the teachers is how much easier our methods are. Instead of standing in front of the board dishing out all that cultural crap and getting a sore throat (I had one guy today tell me a 5 minute story about 'som' and 'kluay' being girl's names and I still didn't know the words for orange and banana) they can see that once you introduce the vocab and do a short repitition drill, you then elicit the words by gesture only and then get the students to work in pairs or whatever while the teacher just stands and watches - with the odd pronunciation correction thrown in. So much easier and so much more beneficial to the student.

[Guest]

Phil

They obviously need "something" to break the chain, they are teaching in the way they themselves were taught.

The old question "Who will teach the teachers" should be addressed by the Ministry of Education........ was that a flying pig just shat on my shoulder?

You say that 90% of your interviewees were rubbish, does that mean you got some decent teachers for your course?

I'm in England right now visiting family and getting visas sorted out and struggling with the linguaphone Thai course. At the end of June I'm doing an afternoon course at the British Council, could you send me details of the times for your course. I really need to get more than restaurant and travel Thai so I can talk to the GF's family. She seems to think that if she teaches me I'll go and practice in NEP...... as if!!!!

My E-mail coquetislander@hotmail.com

Thanks in advance. Do you want to swap the Bryson book by the way?

[Guest]

coquete,

I'll send you the details in the next few days (still putting the final touches to the more advanced courses)

Out of 26 teachers interviewed (and 12 more tomorrow) I've got 3 so far who I think I can mould into decent teachers. I need 10 at least.

Thanks for the offer of the swap but I'd really like to buy it and add it to my Bryson collection. Thanks anyway.

[iuytrede]

English is by far the most taught language in the world.

There is a lot of money in teaching English.

So a lot of research has been done about teaching English to different kinds of people, many teaching methods and teaching materials are available and competing with each other. You can find good textbooks, good bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, good grammar books, good tapes.

For other languages things are much, much worse, but improving.

E.g. German: until a couple of years ago there was only one textbook that used a communicative approach. There is only one monolingual dictionary (a bad one - but there is no competition, because the market is too small). There is no good grammar. Teaching methods depend very much on the teacher, and many teachers will teach what and how they have been taught: rote learning of grammatical rules, out of date vocabulary, formal pronunciation that is never used in real life.

It is even worse with languages which are seldom learned by non-native speakers, like Cantonese or Thai. Teaching is mainly an amateur activity - and it shows.

The problems are magnified by cultural differences. An American will spell "lion" as l-i-o-n. That's it. Language is just the way it is, and you teach it the way it is. A Chinese can tell you many interesting things about the way "shi" is written. He will probably forget to tell you that "shi" is not the word for "lion". And (if he is not from Beijing) he will certainly not willingly tell you how he pronounces it (because his pronunciation is considered wrong). Too much cultural ballast.

An American might see English just as a means to communicate. For a Thai from Isarn, Thai is a lot more. If he just wanted to communicate, he might as well speak Lao - everybody can do that! Thai is a way to show (off) your status, so he wants you to learn Thai the way it should be spoken - not necessarily the way it is spoken.

PS sorry for the Brits - but you are a minority

[Sukhumvit]

As dsa points out English may be the widest taught 2nd language but it's not the most widely taught/spoken.

First is Mandarin

Second I believe is Spanish

I think that English weighs in 3rd.

Both Arabic and Portugese are fairly widely taught. More than the likes of French, German, Japanese etc. Probably there's a website with details of statistics.

[Guest]

quote:

---

Originally posted by db_sez_aloha:

[QB]Got these stats from

http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html

...

3 ENGLISH 322,000,000 ..."

---

 

Could this be way out of date?

If you combine the population figures of the US (270 m.), the UK (60 m), Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, one should arrive at over 400 million.

Or don't them Yankees speakee da Inglis no mo?

Hables Espanol?

SB

[Guest]

quote:

---

Originally posted by db_sez_aloha:

"Spanish is #2 as I recall, followed by Chinese and Indian sub-continental languages. I'v even seen a stat that 1.5 million people in America speak German at home."

---

Just found stats which list the top five foreign languages is the US as follows:

1.Spanish

2.French

3.German

4.Italian

5.Chinese

Surprisingly, Thai doesn't even make the top 15. Nr. 15. is Russian with 241,000 speakers.

I'd thought there were more Thais, going "pai nai ma?", "mai mee ngoen" et al.

Gawaritje pa-Russki?

SB

[iuytrede]

Ethnologues figures are crude estimates and sometimes way too high.

There is a lot of political pressure for some languages too inflate the numbers of native speakers.

For a language like Mandarin, China wants to keep up the illusion that the country is more homogenuous than it actually is. The real number is probably 100 or 200 million less.

In many cases of young Chinese it is a matter of definition what their first language is. They might speak Hokkien to their grandma (because grandma can only speak Hokkien), Hokkien in most situations to mom (mom is reasonably fluent in Mandarin), 50% Mandarin to dad (dad is fluent in Mandarin), only Mandarin to classmates (Hokkien is considered low class), only Mandarin at work (same reason), only Hokkien at the market, Mandarin with their lover. They learned both Hokkien and Mandarin from their parents, and were encouraged to speak Mandarin at home.

Languages of diminishing importance (Russian German, French) want to keep the prestige of an international language, even if hardly anybody cares about this language anymore.

Germany has 82 million inhabitants, several million of whom are Turks or other recent immigrants. Add a couple of millions for Austria (ethnologue doesn't even count Switzerland, they don't see Swiss German as Standard German), and you'll end up at less than 85 million. So how do you make the magic figure of 100 million (they used to make it)? You add Switzerland, off course. And you count all those people from Kazakhstan, Poland, Romania, whose ancestors emigrated from Germany in the 18th century, and who will tell everybody their first language is German - because that way they can get a German passport. First thing they do in Germany: attend a language course and learn German.

(BTW if I add up ethnologues figures for German I get maybe 88 million, not 98)

The French just count all their former African colonies and pretend la grande nation has converted the Africans to native speakers of French.

Now the Thais get real third world treatment: according to ethnologue Thai is spoken by 20 million people. The rest speaks Lao, Bisu, and don't forget the 5880 speakers of Mandarin! (They did forget the Thai speakers in Germany though, more than 10000, married to Germans, and they don't show up under "northeastern Thai" either)

Ethnologue is very nice, but it is not the Bible.