Based on a report submitted to Surin Education Service Area 3 and published in this form originally by the Volunteer Educational Network (VEN)
Introduction
This paper first describes the attempts of one non-profit organisation (NPO) to help teachers in rural north-east Thailand to cope with the radical national curriculum guidelines being implemented in 2003 nationwide by the Thai Education Ministry. It then describes the results of observations of six teachers who attended those workshops leading to a discussion of implications for future teacher development efforts. Finally a low-cost, local-teacher centered development framework is outlined.
Background
The Thai education Ministry is radically changing the way in which English education is structured and taught in Thailand (Mackenzie, 2003; ONEC, 2002). The main changes outlined in the National Education Act (NEA) of 1999 include introduction of:
- early education; addition of four more years of English education (starting from first grade rather than fifth).
- naturalistic approach to language learning; listening and specking focus for fist two years, before introducing reading and writing.
- dictation of methodologies to be used by teachers; TPR in first two grades, Theme- and Task-based approaches in fourth to sixth grades, content-based in secondary.
- emphasis on the four C’s: communication, culture, connections and community.
- movement towards wholesale adoption of communicative and autonomy fostering approaches to language teaching.
- desire to give schools more freedom in constructing heir own curricula.
Although great strides have been made in the provision of general education to a larger proportion of the population with increased numbers of teachers being hired and student/teacher ratios significantly below Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Education Indicators (WEI) averages (AWEI, 2000) as Smith (2003) notes, modification of the national curriculum is too slow to respond to these changes. While Smith advocates that the modern educational framework should stress the importance of continuing self-learning and developing the problem solving capacity of children, I suggest that first it needs to focus on the development of teachers, since it is only through teacher development that the education system will be able to meet the lofty goals it aspires to. Unfortunately, although the need for teacher development programs has been identified (albeit a little late, see TERP, 2002; Fry, 2002; ONEC 2002), as yet relatively few resources have been assigned to this field. When they have the emphasis has been on secondary and tertiary education (TERP, 2002) rather than the primary sector where the changes are most radical. Indeed because of the rapid increase in the number of teachers required to meet the needs of the expanded primary education curriculum, many primary teachers have received no training as teachers (TERP, 2002, p. 6) or are trained in subjects other than the subject they are teaching.
Further, despite the necessary conditions for sustainable development clearly outlined by the ASEAN summit 1998 for environmental projects (ASEAN, 2002b, p. 2) including, “…a series of medium term action plans which will set strategies and specific activities with measurable targets and outputs including means of implementation and mid-term review mechanisms,” very little has been planned in terms of teacher development. Ironically, the ASEAN framework has been applied to student development and results in terms of student assessment outcomes (ONEC, 2002). This may be partially rectified by the ASEAN Committee on Education (ASCOE) (founded September 2002), although its stated mission is to promote ASEAN awareness in primary and secondary schools (ASEAN 2002a) which may lead to increased rather than decreased burdens on teachers who are already over-stretched.
The Thai education reforms have deep and long-lasting implications for teacher:
- Education-Ministry-controlled textbooks have been removed from the curriculum in order to force teachers to become their own materials developers.
- The previous, concrete, grammar-based syllabus has been replaced by competency targets which most teacher do not understand. The aim is to force teachers within individual schools to become their own curriculum developers.
- The education ministry desires to make schools more autonomous and distribute responsibility for educational decisions throughout the education system.
Clearly without attention to teacher development, the goals of the Thai education reforms are unlikely to be achieved.
Participants in CANHELP-Thailand who were participating in school construction projects in rural Thailand noticed the situation in Thai English language education. In conversation with Thai teachers who expressed a need for basic training in communicative methods and ongoing opportunities for professional development, they decided to set up an organisation that dealt specifically with these issues. Now called the Volunteer Educational Network (VEN), they ran their first series of workshops in Sakeow province in 2001. The second series ran from July 28th to August 1st when VEN conducted five days of workshops entitled “Recipes for English Teachers” in the Thong Tharin Hotel in Surin city, Surin Province, Northeast Thailand for 150 teachers from Educational Service Areas (ESA) 1, 2 and 3 organised by the chief administrator for English Language Education in the Area, Mr. C. Chachai. Ten volunteer instructors (of whom I was one) lead the workshops. Teachers were split into five groups based on the grade level they taught. Each group was lead by a two-volunteer-team and were subdivided into two smaller groups of around 15 people lead by one volunteer each. Different volunteer teams operated independently, sometimes leading their individual groups separately and sometimes combining the groups.
The stated aims of the workshop were to:
- introduce teachers to communicative language learning (CLL) activities
- give teachers the opportunity to use these ideas with real students in real classroom situations
- introduce teachers to classroom observation and give them the opportunity to observe CLL activities used in real classroom situations
- o encourage teachers who already use CLL activities to share them with others and develop their ideas in a public forum.
The basic timetable is shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Outline of the VEN Workshop for Surin, July 2003
Date
|
Topics
|
Monday 28th
|
Orientation & Introduction to CLL principles and sample activities by volunteers.
Micro-teaching of teacher-generated activities.
|
Tuesday 29th
|
Continued Micro-teaching of teacher-generated CLL activities.
More CLL activities from volunteers.
Lesson planning in preparation for demonstration lessons and observation preparation.
|
Wednesday 30th
|
Demonstration lessons and observations I
Observation feedback sessions.
Re-planning the demonstration lesson.
|
Thursday 31st
|
Demonstration lessons and observations II
Observation feedback sessions.
Orientation to the Mini-conference.
|
Friday 1st
|
Mini-conference:
First sessions lead by volunteers
Second sessions lead by selected teachers and guests from Sakeow.
Closing Ceremony and feedback questionnaires.
|
Two weeks later, from Monday August 18th, to Friday August 22nd, I visited six schools in ESA 1 and 2 to observe classes, interview one teacher from each school who had attended the VEN workshop and discover what changes, if any, teachers had made to their teaching as a result. This report represents the conclusions and ideas for future development suggested by the data gathered during those visits. While this report highlights problems that I think are prevalent among Surin English teachers, this does not mean that all teachers have these problems, but merely that since one or two teachers in this small sub-sample displayed the following behaviours, there should be cause for concern that this is symptomatic of more general trends within the Surin teacher population. As such, highlighted problems should be viewed as the basis for future development and should enable VEN to plan future workshops in different areas with an understanding of the consequences of the current focus.
Principal Observations
All teachers interviewed noted that their teaching had changed in a positive direction as a result of the workshops. This was also supported by my observation of classes they taught. However, many noted that there were a number of underlying problems impeding their and other teachers’ development and therefore the development of English Language teaching and learning in the area. These are considered below.
Teaching Changes
Of the six teachers I observed, I believe two to stand out as being most aware of student-centered CLL principals and practice.
The first has enabled her students to:
- suggest alternative ways of learning and using the target language
- construct activities to use with their classmate for language learning (one group made a card game to practise sentence construction)
- suggest their own topics for projects (local attractions for tourists)
- use their own content for language tasks (for example each student explains how they made a flower from recycled materials)
The second asks students to:
- tell her what vocabulary they want to know in English depending on the topic (helping students to personalise their vocabulary choices and increasing the likelihood of remembering the words learned)
- making their own versions of songs taught and writing their own songs on their own topics of choice
- volunteer without fear of repercussions or negative feedback
Looking across the other teachers as a whole, the following are signs of change toward more communicative, student-centred methods:
- using more pair and group-work
- using more games, songs, and interactive activities in class.
- using more English in class when giving instructions and commenting on student efforts.
- planning lessons more.
Teacher Development
Teacher development is a long slow process. While the above developments can be seen as positive outcomes of the workshops and a development in communicative language teaching, it is important to see this as the first step on the way towards future development which needs to be guided. Teachers, having started to change how they teach, need to be helped to develop, just as they are helping their students to develop. The following describes specific action points that need to be dealt with from now on so that teachers do not become ‘activity-centred’ rather than student-centred. It is also important to emphasise to teachers that making connections within and across lessons will help students to learn more language and that since the Education Ministry has devolved curriculum development power to teachers, they must see the big picture of the whole curriculum they are teaching as well as thinking about the minute-to-minute activities that they use in class.
Activity-Centered vs. Student-Centered
There is evidence that teachers are generally more activity-centred than student-centred at present. For example, although they have created lesson plans based on linguistic objectives, some teachers use activities in an arbitrary order, rather than moving in a logical order from more to less-guided and structured activities, from presentation to production activities or from teacher-fronted to student-generated activities. This may be due to a weakness in lesson planning technique. During the workshop, many teachers noted that this was the first time they had had to make a lesson plan. Practice in lesson plan construction and delivery then needs to remain a priority.
Teachers also tend to focus more on having the students do the activity rather than making the activity work in the way intended, having the students produce language in order to complete the activity, or choosing to use appropriate activities to elicit particular language.
For example, in order to have students practise the structure, “Are these Xs yours?/ Is this X yours?” one teacher had students write a word and their name on a card. She then mixed up the cards and re-distributed them randomly and asked students to go around the class asking the target questions while substituting the things on the card. Students were asked to cover the name, but by this time many had already read it. Students ran around the room, some asking the classmate who wrote the word one question in English (if any), others covering the name, showing the card to a classmate and looking at them in a questioning manner while making a non-verbal questioning sound. When asked whether she thought the activity was a success, the teacher answered affirmatively.
While the teachers’ observational abilities are obviously in question, the main reason for the failure in the activity was that the teacher did not think through exactly what the students needed to ask/say, and therefore what information needed to be on the card and what did not. She was focussing only on the completion of the activity in order to move onto the next point in the lesson.
Attention also needs to be paid to appropriateness of activity to the language being taught. In one lesson observed, students were performing skits. Two groups of students presented highly entertaining imaginative skits with well developed roles based on restaurant language but the third presentation on directions was straightforward and uninteresting. One reason for this is that while giving directions is a function, being in a restaurant is a situation. Situations give students a lot more scope for imaginative language use than functions which are linguistically more limited. Indeed situational language uses a variety of functions (see Figure 1) while functions might use a variety of sentence-level grammatical constructions and these in turn can have different vocabulary substituted into them.
Figure 1: The different levels of language use
This suggests that role-plays are best for situational language while functions may be best taught using games or information gap activities. Sentence level grammar might be best taught in repetitive tasks like learning a song or information gap activity while vocabulary can use flashcards, pictures, or individual research.
Connections
Other teachers appear not to have understood lesson planning yet. Their lessons are a mixture of songs, games and choral repetition of vocabulary, using structures with no apparent connection to each other. One teacher observed used the stand-up, sit-down song as a warm up, had students repeat greetings and responses (“Hello”, “How are you”, “I’m fine thank you”) and ended with fruit names as a vocabulary building exercise. While the teacher stated her underlying logic as the first activity was a warm up reinforcing instructions language, the second was a review of useful language that students need to know and the third was the actual object of the lesson, there should be at least some kind of connection within the lesson and the language used. Connections can and should be made between:
- familiar language and newly introduced language
- language used in previous lessons and the current language objective and then current objectives and future language lessons
- language taught and students’ personal experience
- content used for teaching and language used to describe it.
Attention to Language Development Through the Curriculum
Connections also need to be made between the individual lessons being taught and the larger English language curriculum both for that grade and for other grades. Currently, very similar language is being taught at all levels of the education system. This language is generally of a very basic type: likes/dislikes, haves, colors, fruit, animals. Teachers, when asked, claim that students do not know the language so they need to continuously review the same language. Theoretically, language ability should develop through the language curriculum by revisiting basics but also moving forward as in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The theoretical spiral of language development across the curriculum (Adapted from Bruner 1960.)
Currently however, there is very little development of language ability among students. This may be due to a number of factors such as:
- teachers not pushing students enough to try to develop their ability
- teachers playing safe and teaching things that the students are familiar with and have been taught before.
- teachers not motivating students to learn
- teachers not constructing curricula coherently enough to engender language development
- teachers testing too much and teaching too little
- teachers using too much Thai in class
- teachers not being able to use English to a standard high enough to be able to teach it.
Translation and Repetition
When observing classes I also noted that many teachers were:
- Automatically translating instructions given in English or vocabulary introduced in English into Thai. For example, one teacher said, “stand up” in English and then repeated the instruction in Thai. When teaching things in the classroom another teacher pointed to the thing, said the word in English, had students repeat it, then said the word in Thai and had students repeat that.
- Automatically having students repeat everything after the teacher. One teacher was teaching numbers, colors and nouns: “three orange crabs”, after repeating three times, she moved onto the next card “one black crab” and repeated that three times. No opportunity was given for students to generate the language without the teacher prompt.
Reasons given for these behaviors were that this was necessary because:
- it helped students understand
- students need to use the language
- it was the way teachers were told to teach language in teacher-training college
While repetition is necessary for remembering language, enabling students to repeat the target language in different, real communication situations should be the teachers aim, not simple choral repetition. In response to the three points above:
- Repetition is not an aid to understanding. It may be an aid to memory in lower-level learners. However, repetition with constant translation is unlikely to lead to memorisation as there is no real need to learn the foreign language when the first language is constantly used. At some point (as early as possible) the repetition needs to stop and independent production by the students should take over from the teacher-lead chorus. Teachers also need to test whether students really understand what they are repeating by having them use the language in a different order from which it was repeated. With lower level learners, choral repetition with pictures and words should move away from pictures towards words only which should them be randomly presented in order to familiarise students with the written form in order to transition to reading.
- Repetition is not using language. Using language is students choosing appropriate linguistic forms (sentences and vocabulary) in order to complete a communication task. Repetition is not communication.
- Teachers have undoubtedly be thoroughly trained in choral repetition since it is remarkably consistent across all teachers observed and is symptomatic of “traditional” audio-lingual training rather than “modern” communicative methods.
Over-focus on vocabulary
Another major consistency across observed lessons was the focus on vocabulary. Teachers are overly concerned with students learning a large number of words rather than a large number of sentence patterns or other linguistic features. In only one class that I observed was there any teaching of situational language or functional language. Class time is generally used in choral repetition of vocabulary or sub-sentence-level phrases, work which may be better suited to private study rather than class-work. In focussing on the vocabulary, teachers are neglecting other parts of language that are as, if not more important (see Figure 1).
The Implemented Curriculum
Some teachers believe they are implementing student-centered CLL methods in class while they are actually using different forms of teacher-centered methods. This is either a problem of perception, or a misunderstanding of what student-centered CLL involves. This is possibly the most problematic issue observed because:
- Teachers develop a false sense of confidence
- Teachers who are confident that they are using CLL may be advising others incorrectly
- Once new methods are used, they become ingrained and difficult to change
- The only way this can be observed is in the classroom while the teacher is teaching
Figure 3 shows the different levels of curriculum and how they are assessed. Traditionally, it is the job of the supervisors in each area to collect data that schools generate in the form of reports and test results. So far, this role has not included the collection of lesson and curriculum plans, or the regular observation of teachers in classrooms teaching. Also, data collection is most often for evaluative purposes than for developmental purposes. In other words the information flow is one-way from the schools to the supervisors unless the school asks for help.

Figure 3: Different levels of curriculum implementation and how they are assessed
Suggestionsfor Future Development
English language teaching in Surin Province is at a critical stage in its development. Current policies of sporadic workshops for a limited number of teachers are unlikely to meet the challenges laid down by the Education Ministry in its reformed curriculum. In order to meet the challenges head on, it is necessary to form a multi-faceted approach (see Figure 4) which involves running regular workshops for re-training teachers in CLL methods, developing a regular communication system for teachers to share ideas and help each other to develop, developing a feedback system so that teachers can come to know that what they are doing in class is actually what they planned and helps their practice of CLL methods to develop.

Figure 4: A multi-faceted approach to English language teacher development in Surin Province
Underlying Problems
In participating in teacher development activities in Surin, it is important not to ignore the larger contextual factors (of which there are many) that impede progress. These include but are not limited to:
- Large classes
- Generally one English teacher per school
- A heavy teaching workload
- A heavy administrative workload
- Other school duties (making/distributing school meals, extra-curricular activities)
- National hiring policies that do not take into account the need for a specific type of teacher in a specific school
- Low level of English of the English teachers, many of whom are not English teachers by training
- Largely audio-lingual teacher training
- Many teachers have been teaching the same way for a long time and therefore find it difficult to change
- Sudden pressures on individual teachers to become curriculum writers, materials developers and testers in a very short time with minimal training.
Most of these factors are systemic and therefore require larger organisational changes on the part of the Education Ministry. Few can be dealt with on a local level. However, we should expect that if teachers are taking part in teacher development activities in the English language, their ability will increase.
Teacher Training
Current teacher training methods need to be investigated in order to ensure that CLL is introduced at as early a stage as possible in the trainee teachers experience. I had the opportunity to observe a trainee teacher teaching an English class. The teacher ‘supervising’ her was not present for most of the lesson and feedback on the lesson was not given as a matter of course. There was very little evidence that the teacher had been trained in CLL methods. She used a CLL textbook but managed to remove all the communicative activities outlined in the text and had students copy dialogs for forty-five minutes out of a sixty-minute lesson. The final five minutes of the lesson involved teacher-led practise of the dialogs.
In talking to the supervising teacher, I suggested that she give the teacher feedback and suggestions for making the lesson more communicative. She resisted this suggestion and asked me to do it. I insisted that this should be her responsibility since she was going to be supervising this teacher throughout her training.
It is imperative that teachers coming into the system are well trained in CLL if the quality of English education in the region is to improve. To this end, I suggest close collaboration with the ESA supervisors and the local teacher training colleges in order to create a set of guidelines for both supervising teachers and trainees that emphasise the importance of observation and feedback. Teacher training colleges may also be able to introduce a series of observations where trainee teachers observe more experienced teachers using CLL methods in class.
Ongoing Observation & Feedback
In order to fully understand what is happening in classes, teachers and supervisors need to embark on a program of observation and feedback that focuses on how the lessons taught in Surin schools could become more communicative. It is important that these observations be development- rather than evaluation-focussed. In fact, I would suggest that they should be non-judgmental. Check-box lists are less useful than statements of what was observed and questions about what was happening in class and the results of classroom activity. Focus on what students are doing and language they are producing (or not!) is imperative. These observations should be regular, and should become an integral part of teacher development in the region.
Teacher Development Networks (TDN’s)
Since most schools only have one English teacher, there is little chance for teachers to communicate with each other about teaching. However, there are many schools that are within three to five kilometres of each other suggesting that it would be relatively easy for teachers from different schools to come together in casual informal settings over a meal or drinks after school, during holidays or at weekends to meet and discuss teaching issues. Although this superficially seems like an increased burden on teacher leisure time, these TDN’s could in fact decrease the workload of teachers by sharing the development burden. Suggested functions for these groups are:
- Sharing lesson plans and teaching ideas.
- Collaboration on curriculum plans for a number of schools in the area.
- Giving feedback on the classroom implementation of those plans.
- Creating peer-observation schedules.
- Discussing and formulating evaluation strategies.
- Discussing wider-school issues
Essentially then these networks would be peer-support groups for English teachers in the area which would decrease the overall workload and could have a reporting function to the ESA supervisors.
Surin Teacher-Lead Workshops
This week, several teachers who took part in the VEN workshop will hold another seminar for teachers who could not attend. This is a very positive step since it acknowledges that there are a large number of very talented teachers within the area who understand CLL methods and are interested in continuing to help English language education in the area develop. It is very important that these workshops continue in tandem with other development methods. Only having sporadic workshops is not going to make a significant impact. Having a regular workshop program run by the teachers themselves along with TDN’s and an observation program will likely lead to larger gains.
Provincial/ESA Newsletter
Finally, the idea of a newsletter for the province or newsletters for each ESA was suggested in the VEN workshop. The presentation of this idea attracted seventeen people who actively took part in discussion of the issues involved in making this a reality. It is imperative that this enthusiasm be tapped and an editorial team be formed in order to help make at least one newsletter for the province a reality. It is also important that this be published regularly and that adequate funding be available for one copy to be distributed to all teachers in the province.
Conclusion
It is important that teachers feel that they are embedded in a learning community that is interested in their problems, contributes to their development, has the best interests of students at heart and cares about them as teachers. It is also important that Surin Province English education supervisors be as supportive as possible in implementing any or all of the above suggestions. This may require a change in the role of the supervisors and a culture change within the ESA’s. Exactly what these changes are and how they can be managed is beyond the scope of this report, but I hope that continued communication within Surin Province, and between Surin, VEN and myself will enable these systemic changes, which in turn will enable the development of the above framework for sustainable teacher development and help the field of English language teaching in the area to become more communicative, more supportive and ultimately more successful. As Chapman and Adams (2002) note, even one inspired, creative teacher can make a difference. In Surin, the aim is to inspire a body of teachers and enable them to cope with the lofty goals of Thai education policy in a way that balances their personal development, the ideals of autonomy theory, the needs of the system and the availability of local resources.
References
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