What I Learned About Teacher Education in Thailand

For 13 days I rotated around three unique schools and saw three unique groups of student-teachers teach at each school. In my post before I left for Thailand, I wrote:

in Thailand I want to see how students will fix their own lessons and how this experience will change their view of what effective teaching and their image of themselves as teachers.

In the blog, I try hard not to write about people or schools in such a way that would reveal information they would not want shared. I am a little worried that what I would write might reveal certain details that schools and or the student teachers would prefer not to be shared. However, I do think that I can share what fascinated me the most about this whole experience.

At the Thai schools we had three groups of people working together on planning the ideal English class. These groups had different life experiences and views on teaching, they were Japanese college professors (who were American!),  Thai and non-Thai English teachers working in Bangkok or Ayutthaya, and Japanese pre-service teachers. We had different ways in how we perceived good topics, appropriate activities, our ideal image of teachers, how to interact with students, and how to use materials.

I think that for the classes that were most successful, the pre-service teachers, the Thai teachers, and the American teachers were able to exchange dialogue about the classes, understand each other, and negotiate changes that everyone could be happy with. For the classes that were not as successful (all the classes were actually good, I think), the pre-service teachers, Thai teachers, and American teachers were not quite able to reach a common ground. Nevertheless, the opportunity to collaborate on planning these classes was an incredible experience which taught me about myself, my students, and the Thai teachers; it also brought us all closer together. This trip taught me about how difficult and exhausting communication can it made me a more open and honest communicator and made me feel more alive.

Off to Thailand

I am writing from a hotel in Narita and am off to Thailand for almost two weeks. Another colleague and myself will be accompanying 10 students to Bangkok and Ayutthaya where they will be teaching English at high schools. I think that the students have been preparing hard for their teaching but I still don't think that they are quite ready. Last year, students went to Thailand with an almost perfect lesson plan. However, I took great pride in watching their lesson but then wondered whether students were actually teaching their own lesson or actually teaching my lesson. This year, students have chosen their own topics, activities, etc. Students are divided into 3 groups. Each group has made lesson plans and conducted demonstration lessons. Here are the topics of each group.

Group 1 (Three female students teaching at an All-Girl's High School in Bangkok): Valentine's Day in Japan, Traveling in Japan
Group 2 (Three female students teaching at a coed school in Ayutthaya): Origami, New Years in Japan
Group 3 (Three female students and one male student teaching at a coed school in Bangkok): Seasonal events in Japan, Japanese food stalls

One regret I have is that during the demonstration lessons I tend to talk A LOT and the students do not have much of a chance to give each other feedback after the lesson. If I see something during the lesson that I know would not work well in Thailand I become filled with an uncontrollable urge to point it out and give students my own ideas about how to remedy the problem. I do not have the patience to let students resolve the problem themselves. However, I also think that because the students have not gone to Thailand, they CANNOT understand why some thing might not work. I have been accompanying students to Thailand for a couple of years and feel the overwhelming urge to impart what I have learned before students have had a chance to try to work out the problem themselves. I need to learn to speak less.

No matter what I tell them though, they won't really be able to understand why or why not their lesson will work until they actually teach in the Thai schools. Therefore, in Thailand I want to see how students will fix their own lessons and how this experience will change their view of what effective teaching and their image of themselves as teachers. Well, I have to get ready to go.

Taking Japanese Student Teachers to Thailand to Teach English

Building a lesson from scratch includes choosing the content, thinking about how to present the content to the students in a way that is comprehensible and interesting, conceiving of communicative activities related to the content for students, and determining which language points and vocabulary to highlight to the students. I believe that this is what the best English language teachers in Japan can do.  I have written about this many times, but at my university, we have a teaching internship in a few secondary schools in Thailand where our students try to do exactly this. We tell the student-teachers that they are not teaching English but rather teaching about the Japanese culture in English. This year, a colleague and I will accompany the student-teachers to Thailand for two weeks in January. We have been helping the students prepare since October and we have done up to meeting 5 so far:

Meeting 1: Write profiles to send to host families and schools. Overview of the participating schools.
Meeting 2: History of Thailand
Meeting 3: Culture and customs of Thailand
Meeting 4: Classroom English practice and students receive a description of the kind of lesson plan we want them to conduct.
Meeting 5: Student-teachers present proposals for lessons and receive feedback
Meeting 6: Student-teachers give demonstration classes. More meetings: Student-teachers make appointments to consult with the internship supervisors about their classes.

I wish that we could meet more, but considering all the other work both the student-teachers and my university teachers have, even the above schedule is very hard. In meeting 4, I introduce many different ideas for ways to present material and tasks that encourage the use of all four skills. However, student-teachers probably did not learn anything from this. I have found that student teachers grow when they try demonstration lessons, receive feedback, and fix their lesson. It is only by actually teaching that student-teachers develop the know-how to teach. As I said before, this program enables the student-teachers to do some thing that would be more difficult for them to do as teachers in  a school of Japan: design and develop their own teaching materials and activities to accomplish the English learning goals they have for the children. It is my hope that this experience will  inspire the program participants to develop their own materials when they become teachers.

In a few weeks, I will blog about the themes and lessons of the student teachers.

Giving a Workshop about Thailand at a High School in Akita

This was a while ago but in late August I visited a high school in Akita. I was asked to give them a university style lecture so that they could get a taste for higher education and develop interest in applying for university. On the day that I went, there were actually 14 or so different professors representing different institutions. I gave two 90 minute workshop style lectures and was fortunate enough to be one of the more unpopular "lectures" only having 14 students sign up for each one. I call myself "fortunate" not because I like being unpopular but that 14 is an easy number to work with and I can get a chance to talk to all the students. 

Since my area is English teacher education and the students attending the workshop probably had some kind of interest in English, I decided to conduct about half the workshop in English and half in Japanese. To make the workshop stress free, free discussion between me at the students was done in Japanese and the English parts of the workshop were mainly the kind where students listened to English and reacted. 

The topic of the workshop was school life in Thailand because my department has a teaching internship in Bangkok and I had some material I could readily adapt. Here is what I did in the workshop.

Part 1: Ice Breaking: Four corners

This was surprising successful. I gave the following statements one by one on Microsoft Powerpoint. In each corner of the room, I posted one of the following signs: I agree, I disagree, I don't understand, I don't know. When the students saw a statement, they went to the corner of the room that best expressed their feeling. When the students went to their respective corners, I then called on a few students to explain their reasoning. Of course, this activity was done in Japanese. This activity and the statements came from a social studies teacher I know, and the students were eager to tell their opinions. What was interesting was that in the first workshop, most students agreed with the first statement but in the second workshop most students disagreed. Those students who agreed said that they felt it was important to pretend you agree with people even if you might not so as to not make others feel uncomfortable (I think the Japanese translation is slightly different from the English). Those that disagreed said that you had to be true to yourself.

Anyway, I have tried four corners using different statements in a variety of workshops and usually this has been very successful.

Part 2: Introducing My Department

When introducing my department, I gave an overview of a students' four years and tried to emphasize that students' involvement with English shifts from studying English itself to learning about the world, their area of specialty or undergoing new experiences using English as a means of communication. Here is the slide (I apologize if there are mistakes with my Japanese):

After this, I said that we would learn about Thailand and English would be the language we would use to study it. 

Part 3: Basic Information about Thailand

When I gave the basic information about Thailand, the right hand column of the table below was blank. I included the information about Japan so students would have an idea what the heading of each column meant. I read the information fairly quickly and told students that the goal was not for them to get all the information correct but rather to see how much of the information they could successfully record. At the ending, I showed students the information about Thailand so they could confirm their answers. There were, of course, some words I taught before hand such as "constitutional monarchy, Buddhism, etc..." Because this information appeared in the Japan column, I could teach these words without revealing the answers about Thailand.

Part 4: A Thai and Japanese English Class

I showed a short video of an English class in Thailand and an English class in Japan, both of which I had filmed. I asked students to write the similarities and differences between the classes. This was done in Japanese. Similarities included students' greetings at the beginning and ending of class, uniforms, and the high status of the teachers. Differences included textbooks, the noise level of the classes, and the activities.

Part 5: A Profile of a Bangkok Family

I showed the students a DVD about a family living in Bangkok from the Families of the World series. I have found that if I turn on the English subtitles and pause the DVD frequently asking questions that students can follow the story. I gave students the questions in the left column and every minute or so, I would stop the video and ask the students to answer the questions.

Unfortunately, we did not get to finish the video but the point of the workshop was basically for students to experience university English and maybe leave the class with rekindled curiosity about the world outside their high school and increased interest in pursuing university study. Students supposedly did write their responses to my workshop but I have yet to receive them. I had been waiting for the responses to write this post but I realized that if I do not write soon, I will completely forget what I did. 

JACET 2012, TBLT, Focus on Form, and Teacher Education

I attended the JACET (Japan Association of College English Teachers) Conference in Nagoya City. I presented in a symposium titled  "Considering the feasibility of TBLT based on “Focus on Form” approach in the Japanese English classroom" with four friends. I also went there with the purpose of getting some ideas for English teacher education. 

My friends and I may have had slightly different interpretations of TBLT with Focus on Form but this is how I defined it:


In a TBLT with Focus on Form (FonF) class, adequate attention is paid to both meaning and form. Students learn language through exposure to language, producing language, and instruction. Instruction takes place in either a proactive or incidental way. 

I discussed TBLT/FonF from the perspective of student teachers in Japan. I argued that a strong version of TBLT/FONF might not be appropriate for them but there are things that they can learn from it. I tried to illustrate my point by showing a class in a high school in Thailand which was taught by students from the English Education Department at my university (We have an internship program where our students teach at Thai secondary schools in either Ayutthaya or Bangkok for two weeks). I showed that they are capable of doing a TBLT/FONF type of class. This class featured a listening task where the teachers presented about Iwate's history of tsunamis. This was followed by a fill-in the blank task which could be interpreted as focus on form. However, the dominant communication pattern in this class between teachers and students was Initiation response feedback and asking display questions. In other words, the teachers asked the students factual or language questions about their presentation language questions In some CLT textbooks, this is not considered authentic communication. However, Thai students were able to follow this class and understand the main message. Also, this class was conducted in 100% English. This means that we need to do encourage student teachers to do what is possible for them and their students rather than try to adopt a method 100%. Although this class had little free communication, I believe it was appropriate for the context.

Overall, from attending various presentations at this conference, my belief that good teaching is about experimenting with different methods and learning to apply the appropriate method based on your students' needs, desires, levels and personalities as well as the school context was reinforced.  It is important that we enjoy ourselves teaching (because we have to do it almost every day) and work hard to continuously improve our linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge, and world knowledge as well as our teaching expertise. Students should also enjoy the classes but we also have to make sure that they are also actually learning something.  English class does not always have to be fun, but it should be interesting. These are my beliefs about teaching English as a foreign language that I would like to share with the student teachers.

Questioning Education for International Understanding

I just read the book Imperial Subjects As Global Citizens by Mark Lincicome. It describes the international education movement in Japan from 1910 to the 1990s. I read it after judging a speech contest in which junior high school students spoke in Japanese about their ideal kind of international exchange. The top 6 students in this contest would get to visit a junior high school in Canada as representatives of the city I live in. All the JHS students I heard speak were remarkably mature for their age and were able to articulate their thoughts enthusiastically and well. When I was a JHS student, I was not even close to their level of maturity nor would I have been capable of making such appealing speeches. Nevertheless, there was something about the speech contest bothered me but I was not sure what. The book had been sitting unread on my bookshelf for about a year and I finally decided to open it up and see if I could figure out what was bothering me.

In  a nutshell, the book argues that throughout modern Japanese history, there has been conflicting purposes in international education. One purpose of international education has been to bring up creative, compassionate and independent thinking students who can contribute to world peace. On the other hand, another purpose has been to bring up patriotic students who will respect their country and share Japan's wonderful culture with the rest of the world.

Of course, I think that there is a lot to like about Japan. If I did not think so, I would not be here. Every year, I help run a program that brings students in the English Education Department at my university to high schools in Thailand for for a two week teaching internship. At these schools, the intern teach Thai students about various aspects of Japan. In the past, we have done such topics as seasonal events, high school life, ghost stories, origami, toys, and Iwate's history of tsunami. Usually after the teacher trainees have finished their classes, the Thai students have a very positive image of Japan. Now, before I go any further, please don't get me wrong, I am happy that the Thai students have a positive image of Japan, they should.

Nevertheless, every country has history which they regret. Japan's colonization of Manchuria as well as the Korean peninsula and the human rights violations accompanying this would most likely fall in this category. This history is a big contributor to the resentment that many Chinese and Koreans have towards Japan and definitely affects relations between these countries. I think that this resentment makes disputes over the Senkaku Islands with China and Takeshima Island with Korea that much more difficult to resolve.

In the speech contest I judged, most of the students talked about aspects of regional culture or Japanese culture that they wanted to show the Canadian students. Few talked about what they wanted to learn in Canada or what they knew about the place they would be visiting.  It seems to me that a lot of what is emphasized in "international understanding" is showing positive aspects about Japanese culture to non-Japanese. Furthermore, it seems that the image of "non-Japanese" that many students have are anglo westerners. Nevertheless, the largest foreign populations in Japan are China and Korea, respectively.

An important part of understanding other people is to try to look at things from their perspective and learn from it. In my daily life here (I cannot speak about Japan as a whole), this seems to be missing. In Thailand, in addition to having the Japanese teachers teach about Japanese culture, we need to ensure that there is a component where the Thai students teach us about their daily lives and customs.  Of course, giving students these kinds of experiences won't immediately solve tensions between Japan and its neighbors. Nevertheless I think that it could be a start.

Bangkok Poverty

I was visiting schools in Thailand for 6 days last week and for 5 of those 6 days stayed in Bangkok. One night I was talking to a teacher-friend of mine (who is Thai) and she asked me what were some things I did not like about Thailand. First, I told her what I did like: the Thai smile, people's hospitality and friendliness, fresh fruit year-round, Buddhism, reading about Thai history, etc. I then told her what I did not like: corruption, poverty, etc. But when I said poverty she stopped me and said poverty was not necessarily a bad thing. I agreed with her. However, I explained to her that what I meant by poverty was seeing homeless children on the street in Bangkok or a mother sitting on a sidewalk breast feeding her child at 11 at night. Seeing these sights was absolutely heartbreaking for me. It was not like I had not seen stuff like this before but now that I have a child, seeing someone about the same age or a little older than my son sleeping on a sidewalk overcomes me with a profound sadness. Believe it or not, I did not give these kids or young mothers money. I wanted to help them, but in the end, I thought that giving a larger sum of money to an organization for getting kids/mothers off the street would be best.

I wanted to learn more about how the disadvantaged in Bangkok live so I bought two books at Asia books, one book was called Bangkok Boy by Chai Pinit and the second was Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughter House by Father Maier. The first book was the autobiography of a male prostitute from rural Thailand who moved to Pataya and then Bangkok. Below the title on the cover of the book is written "The Story of a Stolen Childhood" and you expect that this will be the autobiography of how this poor fellow was victimized. In the beginning of the book, though, Chai (It seems that just about everyone in Thailand uses their first name) writes that the reader should not feel sorry for him and he was writing this story to come to grips with his past. After reading the book, I felt less sorry for the author and more sorry for the people he victimized. I thought that this book shed some light on why some people choose to enter the sex industry, but will not tell you much about how people are forced into it.

The second book I read is about Father Maier's work in a Bangkok slum. Father Maier togther with Sister Maria Chantavarodom runs an organization called the Mercy Centre which runs a orphanage for children who are HIV Positive and also creates schools in the slums. The book consists of the stories of the children in the orphanage or who live in the slum. All the stories are sad but also instilled some hope in me. The reason why is because no matter how dire the situation the children found themselves in, most of them did not give up in their pursuit of happiness and neither has Father Maier. After reading the book I decided to give a small donation to the Centre.

The Difference Between Thai and Japanese Middle/ High Schools

(To the left is an English class in Thailand taught by Japanese teachers.)
Today Eri, Ayu and I had an interesting talk about the differences we observed between the middle school/upper school we visited in Ayutthaya and the middle schools we have taught at or been students at in Japan. Cube, who will be going to the school this month, also participated in the discussion. As Eri mentioned in her blog, it is hard to tell for certain what the differences are because we were only in Thailand for a brief time and only saw one school. So this post will be about the differences we observed.

1. Both Ayu and Eri mentioned that when they studied English in Japan, their teachers focused on vocabulary and grammar. Ayu said she felt the Thai students were a little more fluent because they spent their time in class practicing and learning phrases. Eri said that the school she observed tended to focus more on listening and speaking than in Japan.
2. Eri mentioned that in the Thai classroom the teacher stood closer to the students. In the Japanese classroom the teacher stands on a podium and is farther away from the students.
3. Another big difference was that at the school in Ayutthaya, the teachers made their own materials. In the Japanese classroom, teachers tend to use a textbook.
4. Japanese students are required to have textbooks. In the school we visited students were not required to have textbooks and quite often the teachers provided the material.
5. In the Japanese English classroom it is more difficult to call on a student. Let me give an example: I ask a student in class "How is the weather?". The student mumbles something I cannot understand. So, I ask "Excuse me, can you say that again?" The student looks embarrassed and freezes. He asks his friends what he should do. His friends tell him to say the phrase again. He hesitates to speak. His friends encourage him more and eventually he says the phrase again. Even if I still do not understand him, I will pretend that I do because I do not want to waste any more time. When I taught in Thailand, I asked a student a question. She answered, but I did not understand her. I asked her to repeat what she said in a louder voice. She repeated what she said without hesitation and I understood her.
6. At the school in Thailand, all students in all classes had to do an independent project. In Japan, there tends to be less project work and more test-taking.
7. In Japan classes usually start on time and there are very few changes to the schedule. In Thailand, the schedule seemed to change quite often. So classes quite often did not start on time. I actually found the unpredictability kind of exciting.
8. In the Japanese classroom, the desks are usually aligned in (close to) perfect rows. In Thailand, the desks were not aligned in perfect rows.
9. In Thailand, the students had to take off their shoes before entering their classroom. Teachers, though, did not have to take off their shoes. In Japan, students wear "indoor shoes" when they are in their classrooms and leave their "outdoor shoes" in a locker in the front hall of the school building.
10. According to a Thai colleague of mine the goals of the national English curriculum are the following:

1) Communication: Students have to improve their four skills.
2) Connection: English should be connected with other subjects such as technology, history etc.
3) Community: students have to use English inside and outside the school
4) Culture: Students have to be able to understand about the culture of the other countries.

I believe that the national curriculum for English education in Japan has goals similar to 1) and 4) and perhaps 2) also. To my knowledge, they do not have a goal similar to 3). At the school in Ayutthaya, was that teachers had the freedom to design their own syllabus and create their own materials to accomplish these goals. In Japan, teachers do not have as much flexibility. Quite often a textbook will be chosen for a teacher by his department or school.

The above are the subjective observations of Ayu, Eri and myself and should not be taken as fact. If you would like to add something to the above or correct something, please write a comment!

Teaching English in Ayutthaya Thailand

Last week I came back from Thailand. My university has an exchange program with a secondary school (Grades 7 - 12) in Ayutthaya,　Thailand. Two times a year some of our students will go to the school and teach English for a period of approximately 10 days. This time, I came along as an observer and watched Eri and Ayu do a fantastic job teaching their classes with the rest of their team.
I also had the opportunity to teach two classes and it was a lot of fun! The first class (pictured above) was a presentation in which I talked about Iwate and our freezing cold winters while showing pictures of the university on the projector. I was nervous because I thought that me speaking in a foreign language for an extended period of time would bore the Thai adolescents to death. I was surprised that most of the students listened attentively and some actually asked questions.
In the second class (pictured to the left) I taught pronunciation. The students were in their third year (9th grade US, chuugakkou 3 nensei Japan) and their energy and enthusiasm for practicing pronunciation was infectious.
In my experience teaching at Japanese Junior High Schools I had much more difficulty keeping the students' interests. The more the students lost interest, the more elaborate my lesson plans would become to win back their interest. These elaborate lesson plans had new activities and much more materials involved. This might have had a negative effect; overwhelming the students with the unfamiliar. In Ayutthaya, the themes of my classes were simple and the lesson plans were very basic. It was the chemistry between me and the students that made the class enjoyable. I should have worked on the chemistry more when I was teaching at a Japanese junior high school.
I have a lot more to write about my experience. I will do so later.