A bit of conversation

It has been a while because I have been rather busy. My job here is more than just teaching Chemistry. I also teach a subject they call Astronomy (but it is about much more than stars and planets) and English. In total I have five different courses to teach, hence the lack of time. Besides, our school's team of foreign teachers sometimes has to teach groups of adults during the weekends. The thing is: I am not a professional language teacher, so there are many things I had to find out and materials I have to make. Once the materials are ready, the preparation time of the same lesson decreases significantly.

This blog is about teaching English. I teach English in two classes: M2 (8th grade) and M5 (11th grade). However, the Thai curriculum has two subjects: core English (writing and reading) and additional English (listening and speaking). I teach additional English only to M2.

Now, from my experience in teaching conversational English in Nepal I thought you just divide the class into pairs, give them a conversation, let them repeat you a couple of times and then have them exercise with each other. Forget it. That does not work with kids. They start talking and playing with their mobile phones and do not exercise. First mistake.

Still, I see my colleagues shout their throats raw in front of groups of Thai young adolescents. I pity them. Thai children have amazingly little focus or attention to pay. The Thai teachers at our school are a little smarter: they use microphones. No kidding. Having observed groups of adult Thai listening to teachers or speeches, I have begun to suspect it has to do with the culture. Thai people are in general not silent or attentive when somebody is speaking to them. It is not a sign of disrespect. Thai people regard public speeches and gatherings as a nice outing. They chat with each other, have a picknick, etc. Meanwhile, the speaker is talking through his mike while nobody listens. For my students, it is the same thing. They hold me in high esteem and are very polite and friendly to me when I address them alone. Yet, when I talk to a class as a group, the attention wavers and soon you are shouting to be audible over the noise of the class (to our defense you have to know that the average class has between 35 and 45 children).

My next idea was to divide them into groups and have a 'group leader', that would act as sort of a representative of the teacher. The leader would play A in the conversation, the rest of the group is B and has to answer him. This idea sometimes works. At least: in M4 it did. Not in M2 though, because they do not know the meaning of the word 'leader' or the meaning of the word 'group'. I tried to show them what I wanted by dragging a few chairs together. It was total chaos. Time was up before I could teach them anything. I left the class in confusion.

So, if they cannot be silent, let's give them an example exercise and have them write their own conversation based on the example. It will have them use English and gives them some exercise in building sentences. I gave them the following conversation:


A Do you have shirts?/I would like to buy a shirt. Do you have my size?
B Yes we do. What colour do you like?
A Green please. How much is it?
B That is 200 baht.
A That is too expensive, sorry./Okay, I take it.

About 30% of the class actually handed in something. But even the ones that did, did not always understand the exercise. One student managed to hand in the following conversation:

A I would like to buy a pen. Do you have hats?
B Yes we do. What colour do you like?
A Bag please! How much is it?
B That is 20 baht.
A That is too cheap. I don't take it.

Although I am glad to see this little bugger's progress in sentence building, it appears he did not understand what he was writing. PS: Thai students have problems pronouncing the letter combination BL, so they say "bag" instead of "black". Thus they do not get the difference between a bag and the colour black and confuse the two.

From my colleagues I heard the same advice over and over again: 'play games with them! Thai children are very competitive, they love games!' After some futile attempts at what is probably the normal way of teaching conversation, I started following this advice. I divided the class into two teams and had them play each other in pictionary etc. And yes, I finally had most of the attention focused on the lesson. Some classes enjoyed it so much that the shouting, laughing and crying was deafening. But at least they were shouting English. Yet such games only take you so far. To introduce new vocabulary, they can be useful. But was I not supposed to teach conversational English?

Then, I discovered the puzzle. Word seekers, or cross words. It is truly amazing: the Holy Grail of teaching in Thailand. Give your class a copy of a new puzzle each lesson, and they become silent as mice. First I had some difficulty making a new puzzle every lesson, but then I discovered the websites where you can download the stuff. Additionally, the students love it.

Now my lessons have a set pattern. I begin with about 10 minutes of classical conversation. After these 10 minutes, they are getting too noisy to continue, so I take out my copies. Cheers erupt from the class when they see me do that. Then it becomes silent. While they are puzzling, I tour the class. I take single students or small groups apart and exercise conversation with them for a few minutes, then go on to the next group. At the end of the lesson, they hand in their puzzles. Why was a bit of a riddle to me at first, but I found that they expect me to give them a grade. It was impossible to convince them otherwise, so I play that game and take in the sheets. However, I grade them on their progress during conversation. And to be sure, they are learning. Some were not able to produce a word of English at the start of the semester, and now they answer me in grammatically correct sentences.

So now my lessons work, and additionally the students love me. When I walk the corridors students flock to me to tell me 'you hen some' or 'we love you tea sure'. In class they cheer me. This should not go to your head: they are not able to see their own progress. But it gives you a wonderful sense of purpose and accomplishment. Your work has meaning.