Thai students of English
Having lived and worked in South-East Asia for more than two years, I want to share my experience regarding the way local people learn and speak English. Though the title of this post refers to Thais, the talk will not be only about them but also about Koreans, Lao and Vietnamese, since students of these nationalities are not rare in my language school.
Students’ Social Status
I noticed that all our attemts to find new students distributing our leaflets in the street failed. Didn’t our students walk the streets? Strange as it seems, the answer is no. They don’t walk the streets, they don’t use public transport. They themselves characterise themselves as the middle class -a house and a car are two indispensable possessions that 100% of our students have. Their minimum monthly income is 30+ thousand Baht. As for the jobs they have - most of them are sales representatives, PR people or owners of small businesses.
Educational level
Most of IFL students have at least university bachelor degree and almost lifelong experience of learning English though their level is almost always between Elementary and Pre-Intermediate.
Main difficulties
Structural and phonetic (not phonological!) differences between the Thai and target languages. Thais themselves will also add inborn shyness to this list. But, IMHO, the most serious reason is the absolutely erronous idea that the language can be learned only from a native speaker. On one language school website I’ve even come across the term ‘experienced native speaker’. ‘Teacher’ and ‘native speaker’ are not synonims. Do you agree?