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No Magic Bullets
I noted again recently the
shock and dismay expressed as once again Thailand and the Thai education system
face the fact they are doing a rather poor job of educating Thai students in the
English language ("....tests revealed that Thais have the second-worst English
language skills in Southeast Asia...", BKK Post, Aug 11/05 (note - this story
appears to be unavailable on the BKK Post site, but you can see it here -
http://www.dlo.co.th/news_e.php?news=2109 )). Following which
were the usual "By golly, that's just awful! Heads will roll! We'll have to do
something about that!!" expressions from everyone in positions of responsibility
for this sad state of affairs, and then the equally usual "instant great and
magnificent NEW PLAN" to make everything better real soon!! from the Education
Minister - all of which is, of course, in reality, the usual "Run around waving
your arms and shouting loud and creating a big commotion and LOOK busy and
really serious and concerned without actually doing anything!" for a few days
pattern we see concerning many things here (and elsewhere of course regarding
many things, it's a political thing and this is how politicians behave
everywhere), until the story falls out of the news again, at which time we can
finally get on to the endgame - back to life as normal, forget all about it
until somebody is so thoughtless as to raise this issue again.
And then, as happens regularly, I get a call from some department head at my
university - "Teacher! I have student / grad student / some student(s) who go to
(some country where they're going to have to speak English to get by) - and they
need to learn English! They leave in two weeks, you teach them OK?!?!?! They
come for maybe 5 hour - no more than 10!! - and they certainly don't have time
to study by themselves! - but you can help them learn enough to get by, yes??"
- and there, in a metaphoric nutshell, lies the root, or at least one major
root, of the problem of the poor TOEFL scores, year after year, averred to at
the beginning. The apparently hard-wired Thai belief in some sort of Magic
Bullet that will enable them to ignore English as much as possible for years,
but then learn it quickly and painlessly should the need ever arise, that I have
been seeing for the 7 or 8 years I have been involved with English teaching in
this country. Nobody I know of has ever produced such a magic bullet (they'd be
richer than a guy named Gates if they ever did such a thing), but the belief
seems to be that if we just keep changing Education Ministers and teachers and
plans, SOME DAY!! we will find that Magic Fountain of English, and all will be
well! Haha! With no work!! Won't it be grand!!
It's sure a lot easier than studying, I guess.
But I'm afraid I have some rather bad news, if anyone is ready to listen yet -
there is no magic bullet. If you want to learn English - you have to study.
Seriously. For several years. And practice, practice, practice. (There is an
upside - studying can be fun, and accomplishing something difficult (which
learning to speak English decently surely is) can be satisfying.)
Here is what you need to do, for starters, if you want your university students,
or even a select subgroup of them, to be reasonably competent in English when
they graduate, and be able to deal confidently with TOEFL tests to gain
admission to foreign universities, and not consistently find your students near
the bottom when compared to other SE Asian countries:
1. Get serious about your attitude, which comes from the top down - meaning,
first and by far the most important - get rid of the Magic Bullet mythology -
there are no Magic Bullets. If you want to accomplish something, you need to
work at it. This most assuredly applies to learning English. Teachers need to
teach, students need to study. Paradoxically, perhaps, "being serious" can
actually be more fun than "having fun" - there is a satisfaction in
accomplishing things (being serious), a true enjoyment and feeling good about
yourself, but "having fun" as a goal soon reveals itself to be a pretty empty
and ultimately boring pastime, leading to feelings of dissatisfaction and worse.
As another example - I was once faced with a course for Medical Residents at my
U here - they had just completed 6 undergrad years with NO English courses
available, but now, when they were working 60+ hour weeks, with great amounts of
practical medical learning to accomplish and worry about, the Administration
decided that in response to some government plan that all medical grads should
be proficient in English, in a 30-hour course over 30 weeks, these same
residents would become proficient, in doing doctor-patient interviews, seminar
presentations, writing and reading research papers and all kinds of medical
documents, showing visitors around Thailand, writing a CV, writing letters of
various sorts, general conversation, and several other things that escape me
now, all in English. And many of the students in this very mixed in terms of
skill-levels group probably could not attend many classes because they were
quite busy, or be expected to do much self-study between their weekly one-hour
classes, but they all had to get at least a B, and preferably an A, in the
for-credit course - and that was up to me, the teacher, to arrange. In other
words, I was going to be the Magic Bullet for this year. We've all of us who
teach here seen such things, I think. And that is the sense of unreality that
seems to pervade almost everything around the acquisition of the English
language in Thailand.
English is a difficult thing to learn, let alone master, as is any art or
science, and can ONLY be accomplished through sustained learning and practice.
It simply can NOT be done in a few hours, weeks, or even months. If you want
your university or college graduates to be halfway decent in English, they have
to be studying it EVERY year of their undergrad days, with good teachers and
good courses, one course every undergrad semester, and with lots of speaking -
listening practice, which means SMALL classes, not 30+ students per class.
2. Get serious about your teachers - I understand the problems of too many
students and not enough qualified teachers for all the rural schools, but you
have to come up with something better than teachers who "teach" their students
that, just for instance an example from last week, the word "parents" is ALWAYS
plural, or that the verb "to have" is always conjugated "have" (yesterday I have
lunch, Thailand have beautiful beaches, my boyfriend have nice car, etc and
etc), or "same-same", "no have", and "where you come from?" are good English
conversational sentences. Such teachers are NOT teaching their students things
about English they ought to know - i.e. things that will help them do ok on
their TOEFL test sometime down the road - they are actually doing damage, as
once ideas like this get ingrained in the young learners' heads they are quite
difficult to remove later on (which you need to do if the student is going to
pass something like a TOEFL, or speak without embarrassing him or herself in an
English country). Again, this will take time - the sooner you start, the sooner
you get there.
3. Teach your students to be a bit serious - I understand that "serious" is a
major conflict with the idea that all learning and everything else should be
"fun" and students who fail aren't going to have much fun - but you can't have
things both ways. You can prioritise having "fun" over learning and continue to
pass everyone regardless of their ability and then watch everyone do very poorly
on TOEFL etc tests (where the examiners regard English ability as more important
than whether or not the students are having much fun taking the test) - or you
can get a bit serious and actually make them learn some things before giving
them pass marks into higher levels (and maybe have them learn along the way that
learning can be fun in its own right!!). Things like getting to class on time
are another way of showing that you are taking something at least a bit
seriously.
4. Get serious about assessment - it is ridiculous that at the language
department of my university when I taught there I had to deal with a majority
(that would be in the 90% range, rather than a Canadian election "majority", for
instance, which usually means around 25%, but that's a story for another day) of
first year students who could neither speak nor understand more than a small
handful of spoken English words or sentences - and yet they had all "passed"
several years of lower school English, PLUS the university entrance exams! It's
hard to take anything seriously when you see this going on at the university
level - unfortunately, the TOEFL test people don't play along with this system
and actually expect some performance from their testees, thus the continually
low marks of Thai students, meeting the real world for perhaps the first time.
5. Get serious with what you are teaching - I would not mind teaching these
students who come to my institution at any level, I am a teacher who enjoys
teaching, and the Thai students I have taught (a LOT in six years) are almost
all very enjoyable to work with, by and large, smart and willing to learn - but
the things that are taught have to be at some useful and realistic level for the
students, based on their current level of knowledge and some realistic
expectation of what they can do in the term ahead. At the Language Department at
my university, however, those first year students, with at best beginner-level
ability, were given a very advanced English course with, further, no cultural
connectivity to the situation of most students (the most advanced level of a
course for immigrants to America, with cultural situations appropriate to that
teaching situation, called Interchange 3). These students have no idea, just for
instance, about how to use the simple past tense (Why were you late? I eat
breakfast.) - yet they are supposed to learn the future perfect tense (Tomorrow
at this time I will have eaten breakfast!?!?) Ridiculous to say the very least.
About all that most of these students "learn" from this type of course is that
English is far too difficult to ever learn, and they never want to have to go
near it again. Very, very bad pedagogy. They need a course that is at least
comprehensible to them which, at least at this university, they do not have.
(And although 90% of them learn nothing from this course - they all pass it!!!
and many then go into second year conversation courses unable to speak or listen
any better than they could in the first year course, closer and closer to that
TOEFL test they have no hope of passing - see "assessment" issues above...)
5a. And then we have getting serious about grammar - stop stop stop STOP trying
to spread this nonsense that students learning English don't need to learn
grammar!!!! Communication in any language is composed of two things - vocabulary
and grammar - one is no good without the other. More importantly, regarding the
sad TOEFL scores, TOEFL concentrates a LOT on grammar - rightfully so, in my
opinion, although the test in general is somewhat more difficult than it ought
to be, I think. You maybe need to change the way grammar is taught - if everyone
thinks grammar is just boring and difficult and a waste of time, then there are
both teaching and teacher issues to be dealt with.
6. Give the students a chance! - Many of them really want to learn, but when you
put 30-60 students in the same class the teacher becomes little more than a
babysitter trying to find a few games to keep them entertained for awhile - the
amount of English learning is minimal if not non-existent. Beyond the most basic
levels, students can NOT learn what is essentially a hands-on art form requiring
personal guidance in large classes. You also need to stop putting students of
wildly varying abilities in English together in the same class based on some
unrelated criteria and expecting your teachers to deal with it - this is just a
waste of time for everyone. Poorer students require different lessons than more
advanced students, as in every other course that is taught - imagine putting
elephants and crocodiles into the same class, and trying to teach them to be
tigers. Crazy. Separate them into appropriate levels, they need different
things.
So, some serious problems to be dealt with - government bureaucracy, teachers,
students, courses, assessment - what about a few possible solutions?
1. MOST IMPORTANT!!!! - first just cease and desist with the Magic Bullet
theories - there are no such things, and all the wishing and hoping and
blustering in the world is not going to change this. Luck might win you a
lottery, it will NOT help your students learn English. The longer you proceed on
this course, the more time you are going to waste. Plan and institute some
realistic courses, that progress over several years, with realistic teaching and
assessment and expectations of the students - and in time, you will start
graduating students with good English skills. In time. No "instantly" is going
to happen. No next month or even next year. Accept this. You can speed it up a
bit with more money and better and more teachers, but not with magic. Learning
takes time. Period. The sooner you get on the right path, the sooner you get to
the end.
2. Accept that at this time you can NOT teach all students to become good in
English - there are just too many obstacles right now, from a lack of competent
teachers to many students who don't want to learn English anyways - so stream
them. Those who do not want to learn English, let them go, at least for now, it
is their decision anyways, do not try to force them to do something they do not
want to do! - focus your resources on those students who want to learn, and help
them learn properly over a period of years.
3. I know all the arguments about the impossibility of much of what I say, but
all we are really talking about is political will and allocation of resources.
If you are serious about having your students become proficient in English, you
will make it happen, perhaps using some of the ideas expressed herein and being
creative about other things. You made the Skytrain happen and the 30-baht health
care system, you made the Thai Rak Thai party happen, you build big dams and
skyscrapers and airports - and you can help your students become proficient in
English by providing a positive, encouraging and realistic learning milieu, if
you want to.
4. Show the students that you care about this, really, that it is not just
something you say because you are expected to say it. Give them good teachers
and courses, give them good and honest assessment, demand good performance
(really, this shows you care!) and then reward them when they meet your
expectations, such as by getting high marks in the TOEFL test. Maybe you could
make better jobs available in Thailand for students who can get good scores on
something like the TOEFL test - more money is a very positive incentive these
days. Maybe you could make it known that people who are good in English are to
be honoured for this skill that also honours Thailand through a better presence
in the world community, as teachers or doctors are honoured right now - social
standing is a strong incentive.
In the classroom, be creative with "carrots and sticks", rewards and
punishments. Maybe you could establish some kind of contest, and for the
students or classes or schools that do best in this contest, arrange a visit
from some famous person - someone from the royal family, a movie star or pop
singer, someone all the kids look up to and thus to meet them in person would be
a thrill and honour, good also for prestige in their social group, worth working
for - to meet with the best students and talk awhile (in English, of course!).
Maybe there could be a dinner or something together, a weekend at a holiday
resort - something VERY TANGIBLE that would make them all very happy and proud
of what they have accomplished. Students learn better with this kind of
incentive - and yes it would cost a bit (although most public figures do a lot
of free things for good causes, which this would be) - but how much is the poor
English skills of people costing the country right now? How is your prestige
helped by continually doing so poor in the international TOEFL tests? Maybe you
could look at spending money on English as a good investment in the future.
Well, I guess I've ragged on enough for now. Good luck - although, as they say
in the farming community I hail from in Canada, "good luck" tends to follow hard
work.
Dave Patterson
Prince of Songkla U
Hat Yai, Songkhla
siamdave@yahoo.ca |
