Take a cue from Andrew

Biggs captivates not only his loyal TV audience, but also the Channel 3 studio staff with his clear pronunciation and ever-expanding Thai vocabulary.

"This is my life. From here to here…” – stretching his bulky and long arms wide to encompass four or five one-metre-tall, green and white filing cabinets. “This is how exciting my life has been for the last year. I just sat making up all these language activities for the curriculum.” That’s all I’ve done,” says Andrew Biggs, TV journalist and popular TV talk show hosts, commentator and now English language academy entrepreneur and owner of Andrew Biggs Academy (ABA), as he offers a tour of his 11-room school, located on the twentieth floor of the Maleenont Building, Rama IV Road.

Andrew Biggs Academy

With the hundred’s of language schools in Bangkok, why would Biggs want to open yet another English school? “Well, part of me has always wanted to open a school. I felt, too, that I should practice what I preach, as I had criticised for years the teaching methods in Thailand’s schools as being too grammar centric and not well-grounded in conversation. I want to provide an entertaining alternative,” he says. When asked if he had achieved his goals yet, he answers: “Oh, god, no. No, I’m not there yet. But I think I’m on the right track.”

ABA’s ideal market is teenagers (grade 10) and up; but its current market is young children. ABA has only been open since April and “already we’re near capacity on Saturdays and overflowing on Sundays,” Biggs says.

Teaching methodology

“Our teaching staff tries to make everything relevant to Thais. Instead of a book that asks, ‘Would you like to go out to visit Big Ben or the Louvre, or whatever?’ I want someone to ask, ‘Would you like to visit Siam Paragon?’ ” He says, “So, ABA is my chance to make a difference in the way English is taught in Thailand.”

“What’s different about ABA is our approach to teaching and learning,” he says. Learning English at ABA is “more holistic and perhaps a bit abstract, because we don’t just plod through the tenses or concentrate on grammar. Each class is 90 minutes of conversation and full of fun,” he says.

“In fact,” Biggs says, ‘‘my school doesn’t use any books. There are no books. Daily handouts are okay, but pencils, note taking, writing – anything that takes the learners’ concentration away from conversation is discouraged. Instead of books, we give learners a cassette recorder and tell them to record the lesson and listen to it again at home.’’

“We use props a lot, though, as they tend to help focus conversation. So in a nutshell,” he adds, “the ABA method is just talk, talk, talk, with a little bit of correcting at the very end.” He said in the early days, he asked teachers not to correct but to just concentrate on building students’ confidence to speak. But after several months, he realised students wanted some correcting.

Finally, there’s two minute’s of individual oral presentations at the end of each class.

Teachers interested in teaching at ABA “must be extremely gorgeous,” Biggs says with a haughty laugh, “have all the proper credentials, have a great personality, and be naturally capable of teaching general conversation, but not be dependent on a book as a crutch. Over all, he says, the feedback has been good.

Currently, Biggs presents several shows, including Sub Kao Chao Nee (morning headline news), English Minute, and Ruang Lao Sao Athit (weekend news). “My new show, the English Minute comes on at 7:45. It has a new look and uses proverbs and related materials such as animated drawings as the basis for people to guess the proverb using the picture and win a 5,000 baht scholarship,” he says.

“I often use the Bangkok Post when I teach. I start with a few selected headlines and maybe the first paragraph, and the lesson takes off from there,” he says.

“We come in at 6[am] and we’re on at 7. So we prepare for about an hour. It’s then that we decide what we are going to talk and fight about,” he says. Channel 3 “actually wants us to tone it [the playful arguments] down a little bit, not fight as much; but it seems whenever we do, the ratings go down, and when we have our arguments, the ratings go up. That’s funny,” he says, “because we’re actually very good mates.”

What legends are made of

“I’m actually a journalist. I’m a reporter. I visited the US, San Diego, early on in my life and I fell in love with America and actually visit California more than I do my native Australia. My host mom still lives there and I visit her whenever I return.

At age 16, Biggs won an AFS [American Field Service] scholarship as an exchange student to California, USA. He earned both American and Australian high school diplomas. I received my work-study journalism degree on a cadetship programme in Queensland, Australia, while I worked for the Courier-Mail.

“I returned to Thailand in 1989. For six months I did nothing but learn Thai. I taught myself,” he says. Because he was studying and had no money, he taught English to get by financially. “I moved in with my Thai friend’s mother-in-law, who spoke no English,” he says. After that first six months he passed the Ministry of Education’s Prathom 6 Equivalency exam in 1996, travelled around Thailand for six months and wrote a book about. Through The Nation, Biggs launched Nation Junior, deliberately designing it to have as little as possible to do with grammar.
“I also had a series that showed on the microbuses. I thought I was horrible, but the show’s success was due to the fact that I had a captive audience. The riders couldn’t easily get off the bus,” he says jokingly.

I worked on the morning paper in Queensland, about three million in circulation.”
“I went to QUT – Queensland University of Technology – at age 19 on a special programme and became an entry level journalist. He earned a Bachelor’s in Business Communication with a major in Journalism. I started to work at the Courier- Mail in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, and worked there four or five years to 1988 as a journalist. Soon Biggs ended up in radio at Macquarie National News, as a reader and a reporter of the news. He also worked in Melborne and in Sydney at the Sydney Morning Herald.

“[Global media magnate Rupurt] Murdock [founder of News Corp and owner of The Times and the Sun]took over the Courier-Mail, and that gave Biggs a direct employment line to the London papers Murdock owned. So, off he went to London. But he could afford only the cheapest airfare, which was on THAI airways, but he was required to stop in Bangkok for two nights. “So at age 26 I came, I saw and I pondered,” he says. When I saw Bangkok, I was blown away. I was wowed by the Grand Palace.

Biggs made it to London, but London was no match for Thailand, so he returned here in 1989. “I immediately started to learn the Thai language. I bought a book and set a deadline of six months to teach myself Thai. Later, I became the first Westerner to graduate from Ramkhamhaeng University [in 2002] with a minor in Thai language,” he says.

Biggs is widely credited for the construction of the flyover bridge currently being constructed at the intersection of Srinakarin Road and Soi La Salle. “I achieved that,” he says, “by sounding like a broken record for one year. Every time I got on the air, I encouraged the government to build the badly needed flyover,” he says.

The next step

“What’s next for me? Actually, I’d rather drop the amount of stuff I’m doing right now, the actual on-air time I have. I’d rather just manage it. ‘‘I love doing the Saturday – Sunday show, and all that, but I don’t want to do anything more. I think I’m doing far too much now,’’ he says. He adds that he has a couple of kids shows in the pipeline that he’s trying to get Channel 3 accept. “They’re just my ideas. I’m not actually on it,” he says. There’s too much happening with this – waving his arms around and pointing to his school’s classrooms – for me to [start my own production company],” he says. “I love being a part of BEC Tero. It’s a typical entertainment company: Crazy. Frantic. Nothing stays the same. I love it, but the school will always my next step,” he says.

The English Camp

For the first time in four years Biggs is going back to Australia. He wants to take the opportunity to do a study tour. He’d like to limit the participants to 20 learners. “So if you’re 12 to 18 years old and you’ve got nothing to do in October, visit Australia with me,” he says. He’s hoping for a wonderful trip. “We’re going to beautiful South Bank in Brisbane; we’ll be at a very good school. The kids are all homestays. And we’re going many places,” he says. Plans are to visit Steve Irwin’s Australian Zoo, just outside of Brisbane.

Each learner will live with an Australian family. He or she is going to attend school in the morning. And in the afternoon, Biggs will meet the group and do some activity that requires the students to speak English. “But also, students will learn about a whole new culture and lifestyle of some interesting Australians. And then on the last day, we’ll all go to the supermarket and buy lots of steaks and sausages, and we’re going to have an Australian BBQ at my brother’s home. And my mom is going to come along, and that’s when they get to meet my mom,” he says. The camp is two weeks, from October 7 to October 22. For more information go to Andrew Biggs.com.