A win-win programme for students and teachers
Thai students who live in rural parts of Thailand sometimes have a limited knowledge of English and even fewer conversational skills, perhaps because their opportunities to speak English are limited. If you go to a rural school and talk to the teacher of English, quite often you will find that the conversation in English is difficult.
Background
Unfortunately, most volunteers coming to Thailand to help teach English end up teaching alone. Also, the organisations that send them prepare them to teach alone. OpenMindProjects (OMP) encourages team teaching.
The idea behind team teaching is simply two heads are better than one. The method uses a regular Thai school teacher and a native English-speaking foreigner who work together as a team in a single classroom to encourage students to learn and use English.
The theory is that the Thai teacher will know her or his students and the local curriculum better and the foreign language teacher will perhaps be better equipped to teach English. Both teachers should learn from one another and the students can learn from both contributing teachers as they work in tandem - as a team - to help students learn. Some advantages of OMP are:
the volunteer will find it easier to communicate with the students, as the Thai teacher can explain directions in Thai;
the Thai teacher, by managing the class, allows more learning to take place;
the Thai teacher knows the students and the curriculum, and this contributes to student learning;
the Thai teachers will have a chance to improve their spoken English; and
the volunteer teachers, if they are qualified teachers, which is often the case with our volunteers, may improve their teaching methods - this leads to long-term benefits for students.
Thailand is a popular travel destination, and so it is also a popular venue for thousands of overseas volunteers, many of whom are qualified teachers with a Tefl (Teaching of English as a Foreign Language) or other certificate.
Most of them teach alone; but what if they were teaching together with a Thai teacher? Within five years, the standard of Thai teachers' English would have been lifted considerably; and students would have benefited from better English lessons with Thai teachers and foreigners teaching them as a team!
In the near future, OMP intends to find out why such an obvious opportunity has not been taken advantage of.
OMP has helped many Thai schools to improve their teaching of English by providing advice and volunteers to help teach English. We have always advocated teaching the volunteer and the Thai teacher together, for obvious reasons. Having worked in Thailand for several years with Thai schools and volunteers, we have gained a lot of experience and have some ideas about why team teaching is rarely practised.
But let's start with the Thai teachers who do like to team teach. Our experience tells us they seem to have the following in common. They are open to new ideas, want to improve their English, have a genuine desire to help their students, already speak reasonably good English, and are often young.
The ones who avoid team teaching seem to be older, have less English skills, and sometimes have few other interests outside of the school.
Hypotheses
There are likely several reasons why many Thai teachers don't speak English very well and why others may avoid team teaching with an international volunteer. Some reasons are listed below.
They had been taught by means of a "grammar translation method" and never had the opportunity to learn to speak. As a result, they teach the way they have been taught - tending to focus on reading and writing.
Unwillingness to have volunteers in the classroom. Many teachers, not just Thai instructors, find it hard to have a companion teacher in the classroom.
The cultural traditions of Thailand may make it hard for many Thai teachers to have volunteers in their classrooms.
The respect that is integral to Thai culture for a person's age and role.
For example, part of the identity of a teacher is to be skilled at what he or she teaches. Some of the volunteers are young, so younger Thai teachers may find it easier to work alongside young volunteers as equal peers. In that scenario, there is less potential for loss of face by the Thai teacher.
For older Thai teachers, having a volunteer in the class may involve a greater risk of loss of face due to the age difference. The older teacher deserves respect due to age, but the greater skills of the younger volunteer may bring about a loss of face, hence the greater likelihood that teaching as a team will be avoided.
Observations
Around the world, English has traditionally been taught by means of the "grammar translation method". Students learned by reading and writing English. They "knew" English when they could perform well on written tests.
This method is often used when the teacher is not a native speaker of English. The problem is that the learners don't really learn to "listen and speak" in English, although the foremost purpose of learning a language is to be able to communicate with others!
Using this "grammar translation method" to learn English also presents particular challenges as English is a mixed language assembled from many languages and full of grammatical exceptions. It is difficult to learn to pronounce English from written text as the number of sounds used is more than the number of letters in the alphabet. For example, consider the varying sounds of "a" in "father", "mat' and "mate".
Given the limitations of the "grammar translation method", modern teaching of English has changed to the "communicative approach" that emphasizes learning through oral communication - the "listen and speak" method. But to teach English using this method, the Thai teachers need good "listen-and-speak" skills themselves. This is a challenge for the Thai education system as it needs to train large numbers of Thai teachers, and this will take many years.
Some countries have developed programmes to train their English language teachers who learned English through the grammar translation method, and who are competent at reading and writing English but uncomfortable speaking it.
Japan has developed the JET programme, in which native English speakers are placed in classrooms to work along with Japanese teachers of English language.
OMP, with its volunteers, and other volunteers as well, can provide the same support to Thai students and teachers when the volunteers work along with Thai teachers.
Next steps
What can be learned from this, and what should be done?
First, these hypotheses and conclusions need to be studied by conducting more research and tests. We aim to do so, and while doing so, we want to find out if the above hypotheses are correct and/or if there are other barriers to overcome.
Based on the findings, we plan to explore how we could go about encouraging and facilitating team teaching among Thai teachers and volunteers/foreign teachers in the future.
We share the goal of the Thai education system, schools and teachers, which is to help Thai children to learn English, which is one of the attributes that can lead to a better future.
Accordingly, OMP looks forward to cooperating with Thai schools and volunteers, and to providing better English learning support to Thai students and teachers in the future. We believe that everybody will benefit from team teaching.
Sven Mauleon is the director of OpenMindProjects Thailand and can be reached at sven@openmindprojects.org . Elizabeth Lee is an associate professor at Queen's University in Canada, and can be reached at elizabeth.lee@queensu.ca .
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