Last week I attended the 34th Annual Thailand TESOL International Conference in Chiang Mai. The theme of the conference was “21st Century English Language Education: Towards Global Citizenship.” I was extremely satisfied with the experience and it made me think quite a bit about teaching English, specifically in Thailand, and how I can improve my approaches and to pass those along to my co-teacher.
Keynote Speech
My reexamining of my teaching practices came at the very beginning of the conference during the keynote speech. Dr. Somkiat Onwimon has a very extensive list of credentials behind his name. In he speech, he was very candid with some of the problems that face Thai English students, the biggest impediment being their reluctance to speak freely. “English is no longer the language of the British or Americans, it is a language of the world,” he said. Each country is teaching a learning English, because knowing the language is no longer an advantage in this world, it will merely put you at an equal starting place.
As each country learns English, the speakers make English their own so that there are countless varieties of English, such as “Chinglish” in China, “Singlish” in Singapore and “Thenglish” in Thailand. The new generation of English students in Singapore is proud of their cultural influence on the language, which from a social justice, colonizer-colonized, anti-imperialist perspective is an extremely interesting thing to think about.
Surveys of Thai university students in English classes shows that their own biggest fear of speaking English is that they want to sound like a native speaker, they don’t want to have an accent. This is something that I have run into a couple times with my co-teacher and in my classroom, really trying to focus on helping my students to pronounce words like I do and try to erase some of the tones that they impose on the words, which they do to help their own mouths make these foreign combination of sounds.
Even before coming to Thailand, I had a bit of uneasiness about teaching English abroad because of the imperialist, colonizing tones. Realizing that teaching English in this world that we live in may still have those implications, it goes beyond that and allows them to compete in the global market, beyond just American and British markets. However, for me to embrace that viewpoint, I need to embrace and encourage “Thenglish” and move away from the idea that my pronunciation, as a native speaker, is “correct” or “better.”
Plenary Speech
These thoughts were a great lead in to the first plenary speaker of the conference, Paul Kei Matsuda, whose speech was titled “Teaching Writing as a Nonnative English Speaking Teacher” (NNEST). Matsuda now teaches at Arizona State University and is a leader in the NNEST Movement. He shared his background, which was rather incredible. Growinig up, he learned English in school but hated it and learned through memorization which produced no proficiency (very similar to how the majority of Thai English teachers teach). It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he was really able to speak English. However, in university, he realized that all of his friends had spent time abroad learning English and under this peer pressure he began to do self-directed study at home by reading and writing anything he could in English everyday.
The current school of thought for teaching English is that the first skill to gain is listening, then speaking, next reading and finally writing. This sequence of teaching has it’s basis in research from the 1940s which goes back to 19th century ideas, which were formed during a time of high illiteracy rates. Matsuda was advocating for more integration of writing in English teaching and earlier on. By making writing the last skill, and holding it to some arbitrary threshold, many students will never meet these arbitrary “benchmarks” to begin learning this skill. But by including this skill earlier on, it allows for literacy to be used as a scaffolding and is also beneficial to visual learners.
Matsuda also spoke about the different strengths of NNESTs and NESTs, which helped me to think about my role in the classroom as well. NESTs provide linguist knowledge, are a role model, have experience as an L1 writer and have a different perspective than their students. NNESTs bring metalinguistic knowledge, are a more realistic role model (going back to the “Thenglish” idea), have experience as an L2 writer and have a shared experience with the students.
He combatted the idea that “nonnative” is a pejorative term, saying that it is only a pejorative if “native” is inherently believed as better and fosters the native-speaker envy from within. With that, he encouraged NNESTs to teach writing because they provide a host of tools that are not available to NESTs, why not use them? He also provided some tips for when they do include writing, the most interesting to me being regarding giving less corrective feedback (or at least how he phrased it): “Don’t stop giving feedback, stop punishing students for not learning,” he said.
Breakout Sessions
Those two speeches really set the tone for my thinking and processing of all the different sessions I went to over the two days. Here’s a list of the sessions I went to:
- Re-conceptualizing Thailand’s English Language Curriculum and Pedagogy for Global Citizenship
- Pedagogy at the Crossroads: Intercultural Communication, Local Identity and Citizenship in ELT
- Ethnographic Study of a Thai Novice Teacher of English
- Bringing Life Skills into the Classroom: What, Why and How?
- Fostering Young Learner’s Creativity in EFL Classrooms
- Pedagogical Implications for Thai Primary Level Teachers of English
- Fighting an Uphill Battle: Professional Development of Primary and Lower Secondary Teachers of English in Thailand
- Enhancing English Language Teachers’ Professional Development through Action Research
- Readability and Lexical Difficulty of Thai National English Tests (ONET and GAT 2)
- Cultural Issues in English Language Teaching Materials
- Blended Teacher Development in Thailand
In these sessions I:
- learned about how the US Embassy has partnered with Thai education officers to introduce reforms to the English curriculum that will focus on preparing the teachers better.
- thought about how citizenship is a relationship between an individual and a state and what that means for “global citizenship”.
- thought about how as a teacher trainer you cannot impart your personality and identity to those you are training.
- learned ways to include “21st century skills” into the EFL classroom.
- learned new ways to inspire creativity in the EFL classroom.
- thought about shifting the pedagogical paradigm from “English as a Foreign Language” to “English as a Lingua Franca”.
- considered some of the challenges facing teachers and what their professional development needs are.
- learned about using action research with teachers to help them to examine their own teaching methods and empower them to learn new methods on their own.
- learned that the national test that Thai students take average over 5,000 different words and that the readability of these tests are the equivalent of giving a native-English-speaking high schooler a graduate level text.
- thought about how visual representations in language learning books may be linguistically fair but often times are not culturally fair and help to reinforce stereotypes.
- learned about a new training method that the British Council is using for Thai English teachers.
Looking Forward and Putting it to Use
I’m really grateful that Ning and I had the opportunity to attend this conference. I think it was really eye-opening for the both of us in different ways and I know she was able to walk away with a lot of new resources.