Section outline

  • Published: 17 Mar 2013 Hits: 1511

    Consider removing 80% of your vocabulary and try teaching a subject.

    Don't panic you will have text books to follow and a curriculum laid out for you, but if you are a teacher through and through you will want to improve your techniques and use the situation to experiment a little with your delivery.

    In retrospect the first time I stood in front of the Mathayom 1 class the students informed me I spoke so fast they could not separate any of my words. I gave a set of instructions and was faced with 24 blank expressions. This left me with a long hmmmmm where do I go from here.

    The end result was I had to rethink all my style of delivery. Firstly I practiced speaking slowly and separating all my words (I felt like going to sleep halfway through a sentence) then I rethought how I scaffold my teaching delivery and I went through words and their meanings more clearly. Extra to this I placed everything I was going to teach or had taught on a web site so the students could refer to it at their leisure.

    All these skills honed, would be useful in any class anywhere, and can only improve teaching to native speaking students.

    Teaching here also gave me a chance to improve on my balance between tool box teaching and teaching for understanding and thinking, It is very difficult to assess understanding when the students are not expressing themselves in their native language. Not impossible I just found it difficult. This also helped my deliveries as I had to consider the implications of limited language to express understanding.

    The two websites below are excellent Thai English dictionaries. I often had these open in the class room on the data projector and anytime I used a word that might be debatable I looked up the Thai meaning. I then selected the appropriate Thai word from the descriptions and pointed it out to the students.

    These have saved me hours of extra work by making sure the students were clear on my requirements.

    http://www.thai2english.com/

    http://www.thai-language.com/dict

    A note about understanding.

    Students will often have a large range of words they know but will automatically put Thai grammar to English words This creates a great deal of confusion for the students as they will often think you have told them to do something and then in the same sentence don't do it.

    The older M6 students informed me this will still occur with some students up to Mathyon 4 level and is very prevalent in Mathyon 1

    Be patient it took me 1 1/2 years to realise the grammar problem, as Thai grammar is nearly the opposite of English with a few other quirks

    In Testing policies and procedures there is a note about how many concepts to place in a sentence.