Teaching Engliish at Baan Nong Phue School

We have told our readers about our school and about much that goes on there, and we have shared a little of the activity in the classrooms where we teach, including a few pictures of us at the work of teaching.  George has participated in a few English camps, including a teacher workshop.  The school year has ended for the summer, and we thought this would be a good time to think back over what we learned and did over our 4+ months at Baan Nong Phue School.

As readers may recall, Mary had Prathom 1,2,3,4,5,6 students (roughly equivalent to Grades 1 – 6 in the U.S.; ages 7 to 12) and George had Mattayom 1-3 (grades 7-9), except for one Prathom 2 class to help even the loads between us.  George didn't have a lot of fun with his 2nd grade class and decided he probably isn't meant to be a primary school teacher.  He doesn't address below what he did with that class because he largely relied on what Mary had developed and still wasn't very successful, we think because he didn't use enough different activities, wasn't exciting enough, and didn't keep the pace moving fast enough for this younger group.  This was evidenced by the fact that he turned around at one point and only 4 of the 14 students were left in his class.

Here are pictures of us in our early days of teaching at Baan Nong Phue, reflecting our different styles:

Warning:  This post has an unusual purpose: it's not just to chronicle what we're seeing and learning in Thailand, but also to provide enough information about what we learned about teaching so that it might help future volunteers who come to Thailand to teach English.  So this is going to get into a greater level of detail than the average reader may care to read.

While we had taught ESL classes in Alexandria for a couple years through the City’s program for Hispanic adults, we taught at the Intermediate level, so the students understood basic English. This was not the case in our classes here.

Mary's Report

As we began teaching here at Baan Nong Phue last November, it quickly became apparent that there was no understanding of English beyond: “Hello, How are you?, I am fine.  How are you?”  Any instruction beyond these basic phrases was met with blank stares.

Enter games, drawings, and lots of pantomime!

For my primary classes, I used a lot of games, songs, and body movements.  Early on, I developed a Songbook that I gave to all the students.

For the smallest children (ages 7-9), songs were perhaps the most popular teaching method.  With all the songs, the students learned some basic vocabulary, e.g., the difference between “right” and “left” and various body parts with Hokey Pokey, If You’re Happy and You Know It, and Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes; vocab like around, motor, babies, parents, up/down, rain, etc. in the popular songs, Wheels on the Bus and Itsy Bitsy Spider; and farm animal names and sounds with Old MacDonald Had a Farm.  As seen in the photos below, I used props, games, flashcards, and student worksheets to accompany the songs:

Prathom 3 and 4 students had fun deciphering “Secret Codes” of song titles:

Another popular teaching method was Bingo.  I created a book from online sources (abcteach.com) that had a Bingo game for every short and long vowel sound.  The students loved playing Bingo!  I usually saved the Bingo game until the end of the teaching hour to give the students incentive to work hard on the preceding lessons.

Another popular Bingo game was Farm Animals.  I bought the animal tiles from a local vendor:

The Fruits and Vegetables Bingo Game was popular with all Prathom levels.  Thanks to our teacher friend, Wachinee, we had the Thai translations for the student handouts:

And, of course, traditional Bingo was perfect for teaching the correct pronunciation of English numbers:

I made number flashcards and the students stood in two long lines (40 students in the class) and quizzed each other with the cards. 

The younger students had fun with the “Five Little Monkeys” that I found in Bangkok.  In teams of five, they would come to the front of the room and act out the poem with the monkeys attached to pencils:

I focused on the Dolch words for much of the vocabulary work with the younger students.  The Dolch words are commonly-used English words that students need to learn to help them achieve reading fluency.  Here are some of the “Word Walls” that I used, along with student handouts for matching words to pictures:

A Colors & Shapes Bingo Game and a Colors Flash Card Game and puzzle were popular with the younger children:

Prathom 4 had fun with a game in which the class was divided into two teams with two sets of cards in 7 basic colors.  The teams raced to see who would be the first to match all the flashcards to the correct colors.

We had been concerned that we should bring a lot of teaching materials from the states, but there were so many great online resources that we didn’t really need them.  We did buy a printer here and we were lucky that Khemmarat, where we live – about a ½ hour from Baan Nong Phue – had some good materials (including old-fashioned laminating paper!) for making teaching materials. These alphabet and puzzle cards that we brought with us were popular with the students, however.

Check out our printer!  Those are big containers of ink on the side of the printer and they’ve lasted for months and months of color printing.  No expensive ink cartridges here!  Are we getting taken by the printer company lobby in the U.S. or what?

A friend of mine from Alexandria, Virginia - Cynthia Ingersoll - has her Masters in teaching ESL and gave me some great ideas, one of which was using a bear and box to teach location prepositions.  This was popular with all age groups:

I used the Bear and Box in conjunction with handouts and games, including a map reading exercise for the Prathom 4,5,6 students:

Students were asked to give directions from one place on the map to another, using location prepositions.

The Prathom 4,5,6 students also had fun with the Big Town game (www.marks-english-school.com) in which each student was a “Big Town character” and practiced various dialogues (as well as vocabulary and writing exercises):

These students enjoyed a more sophisticated “Shapes Bingo” game.  Bet a lot of our readers don’t know what all these shapes are called!

I also taught word opposites using matching and concentration games, as well as road and other international signs in English (part of the national test here):

This verb “to be” poster was a critical teaching tool, given the importance of this verb in the English language:

One of the Prathom 4,5,6 students’ favorite games was Board Slap.  I learned this at our CELTA teacher training course in Chiang Mai.  In this game, the class is divided into two teams.  A student from each team stands in front of the board with the display of items (see photo below).  When I call out an opposite, a form of the comparative, or a shape, the first student to “slap” the correct answer gets a point for her/her team.

Here are some students playing the board slap game with shapes:

And the kids got a kick out of me, at age 62, performing the “Noun Rap” shown in the handout below:

Then I used another CELTA teacher training course idea: to have the students match graphics to the words in the rap.  They did this in teams and the team to finish first with all the pictures matched correctly was the winner.

Students in Prathom 5 and 6 also used “Parts of Speech” and “Diagramming” handouts to write and diagram their own sentences:

To expand on those basic phrases the students knew, Wachinee (Thai translation) and I (English) developed this Basic Greetings Dialog:

After a couple weeks of practice (dividing the class in half, switching “A” and “B,” etc.), I walked into a Prathom 6 class one day and began the class by asking, “So, where do you go to school?”  The students responded with, “So, where do you go to school?”  My heart sank as I realized that the students weren’t learning the meaning of the English words; they were simply repeating the words.  I replied, “No, no, no!!!!” with my hands in the air, purposefully being over-dramatic so that they got the point.  Pointing at myself, I said, “Mary ASKS a QUESTION: ‘Where do you go to school?’”  Then, using the above handout and motioning to the students with both hands open (not pointing, because pointing is considered rude in Thailand), I said, “And YOU say: ‘I go to school at Baan Nong Phue!’”  The drama worked, as I repeated my “act” in all the classes.  Within a couple weeks, the students “got” it.

George's Report

I similarly didn't know what level of English the 7th to 9th graders had.  I worked with Thanorm with the 7th and 9th graders, and Thanorm encouraged me to focus on vocabulary and pronunciation.  The students had workbooks with lessons organized by areas of life, for example, health and hygiene, living at home, social life.  There was a vocabulary list with each lesson.  I started out reading the lesson to the students, asking them to repeat some of the new vocabulary, and trying to engage them in conversation.  But they didn't seem to respond.  And I didn't feel that, even if they were responsive, they would learn much of the vocabulary from the short time I would be spending with them each week (1 hour with each class each week).

So next I tried developing a lesson from a story in the English-language Bangkok Post.  The story had been edited for younger readers and dealt with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and infrastructure development by China and India that would impact Thailand.  China intends to build a railroad line to Singapore (through most of the countries bordering the Mekong River, including Thailand) to get its exports to the port in Singapore.  India has plans for a highway through the Mekong Basin to give access to the port in Ho Chi Minh City.  The point of the article was that the countries through which these transport links would pass need to develop their own links to their rural areas to take advantage of these new backbone links.  That resonated with me based on my 25-year career in transportation, and I thought the students might relate to it because it had implications for the economic future of Thailand and their futures.  I went into my best CELTA mode and identified a context (train travel) and a group of activities around reading an abbreviated and simplified version of the article.  I also decided to use the 60's American (train-related) folk song 500 Miles as a sort of reward for the hard work of making it through the story.

Well, the exercise was, as far as I could determine, a total failure.  The students didn't seem to have a clue about what I was reading, have any interest in the train lore (most have never seen a train in rural Isaan), nor seem to enjoy the song.

So, next I tried teaching parts of speech and used board slap games to drill the students to identify subject and verb -- again, failure.  The students didn't seem to get it and performance on the game didn't improve.  Arrgh, what am I doing here, I wondered.

Then somehow I thought about sentence diagramming and decided to give that a try.  I had always loved diagramming as a young student.  So I started with very simple sentences and asked for aa-saa-sa-mak  (volunteers) to come to the board and fill in the words of a sentence I'd written on the board on a diagram I'd drawn.  Some of the more responsive students in the classes were willing to take a chance and go up to the board, and I would lead the class in applause for their getting up and then for their successful diagramming.  As time went on, the diagramming got more complex and the volunteers increased!  Some students wanted to go up in groups of two or three and I always agreed.  A lot sought and got help from students in their seats and that was fine.  Some volunteered without the diagram being drawn -- they had to draw the diagram as they figured out where the words went.  They were learning parts of speech as part of an exercise that was apparently fun for them.

Mary and I met and visited with a monk, Wiwat, at a temple near the Baan Nong Phue School.  He had recently completed a Masters in Linguistics in India and was returning to work on his Ph.D.

I mentioned my work with diagramming.  Wiwat responded that Thai teachers of English spend too much time on grammar when what the students really need is vocabulary.  That impressed me and I started using the vocabulary lists out of the workbooks for each grade to choose the vocabulary for the sentences I made up for the students to diagram.  Then I would look up the English word in an English-Thai dictionary and try to pronounce the Thai word.  Inevitably, my pronunciation would be wrong and the students would correct me; I would keep trying until the students seemed satisfied.  Then I would emphasize pronunication of the English word and drill the students on that.  I liked to think I was "killing two birds with one stone."

We went from subject, verb, adjective, adverb, to prepositional phrases.

There was a group of students in each class that would do their best to sit back and stay out of the exercise, so I started using handouts with diagramming exercises on them and would ask the students to work on them in class.  By monitoring the students, I could identify where they were getting confused and would work those issues out with the class as a whole and fill that part of the diagram in on the board.  I also looked for students who did not usually participate in class and, when I saw they had a diagram correct, I would ask them to be an aa-saa-sa-mak and go to the board.  Many would refuse but I'd point to their paper, give them a thumbs-up, and they'd go.

I was asked to participate in a 2-day teacher training workshop recently in an area office 40 minutes away.  I didn't know what level of English my audience would have or what the organizers hoped to get out of my participation.  I was encouraged to engage the trainees in simple greeting dialogs and I did that on the first day. Thai people are generally very reluctant to try to speak English with a farang because they feel their English isn't very good.

 

At the end of that session, I wasn't sure any of the trainees got anything out of it except perhaps an icebreaker in that they had now spoken some English with a farang.  

On the second day, I decided to try some diagramming.  It worked!  I sought the audience's help as I filed in the diagram and there were a lot of folks calling out responses.  More surprising to me, I got aa-saa-sa-mak and, when they went to the board, they got the diagram right.

 

I don't think diagramming is a silver bullet for teaching English in Thailand, but I do think it can be one effective arrow for a teacher's bow.