Is it time we stopped teaching English?

Recently, Thai students finished 62^nd  out of 70 countries in English language proficiency.  This is the fifth year that the report done by Education First – a company that teaches English – has placed Thailand near the bottom of the list.

I think it is fair to question the methodology and metrics of the Education First report, but I also think the test results have some validity.  As I walk around the small Thai town I live in, I find very few English speakers.  As the Education First English test was administered over the Internet, I doubt speaking proficiency was even part of the very short test.  If speaking had been tested, I think the Thais would do even worse because they do not speak English.

I think there are reasons Thais do so badly in English – and these reasons have little to do with the science or art of teaching, curriculum or much of anything that happens inside the classroom – but first some good news.

The Good News

I have been an English teacher for most of my life.  For the past ten years I have taught Thais ranging in age from 6, to seniors in their last semester of a college bi-lingual program, to working professionals.  There is no doubt in my mind that Thai students are as good as their counter parts in the west.  There are even  some areas where Thai students are different, perhaps better, than their western counterparts.

Young Thai students draw, doodle, play tic-tack-toe in class (as all students do), but when push comes to shove they take better notes.  This, however, may not be the plus it seems.  First, they are trained (it seems to me) to write very small.  Secondly, no Thai student comes to class without his Liquid Paper, his White Out, and his correction fluid.  They seem obsessed, to me, in producing a clean copy in whatever they do – and they do this from a very young age.  And no high school girl would ever consider handing in a writing assignment in Thai without having the first page framed with flowers or some beautiful design – which probably has nothing to do with what she is writing about.

My informal take away from this is that Thai students are taught that learning a language is a discreet and formal process, much like learning math.  The idea that language is a living, spontaneous, wild and amorphous body of knowledge never crosses the classroom doorsill.  There is a strong sense of saving face in all this, too.  Thais are not taught to learn from their mistakes.  They are taught to learn from poor performance – and this is not the same thing.

The Background to the Problem

Thailand has never been a conquered country.  On the one hand, history has given them complacency that they are fine just by themselves.  But since the Vietnam War and the Americans were here, the Thais have become aware of their deficiencies and backwardness, too.  They may try and deny this – The King and I, for instance, was not allowed to be shown in Thailand – but I think they know it is so.  It’s a toxic mix of feelings.  Thais are rightly proud of their culture, but If they reach back to find meaning, they reach back before the modern era.  And Buddhism, by asking adherents to look inward, reinforces this idea that the past was better than the present.

Thailand is a homogeneous society, too.  The majority of Thais live in the rural country side, outside of Bangkok and other big cities. Yet, this rural society is riddled by rich versus poor, by 50 miles out of town the Buddhist rituals may be quite different, by the idea that everything can be jerry-rigged, and by a real sense that money isn’t a symbol of success, rather money is success.

None of the above has anything to do with tried and true methods of teaching English, but it has a lot to do with predicting outcomes.  To learn English, Thais have to swim against the currents of the own history and culture in ways that language learners in the west do not have to do.  Most emerging countries suffer from the same cultural overload, but ESL programs forge ahead to their destinations as if they were sitting on a train and the scenery outside was of no real consequence.  What else can they do?

Is it time we stopped teaching English?

In a common sense type of way, I think it is.

One of the first rules of teaching is not to present new material to the class without holding the students responsible for learning it – without testing them.   This works for most subjects taught, but not very well for English.  Science is full of laws that are irrefutable (as long as the standard model holds) and that the student must learn, but English has no such laws.  In spelling:  George Bernard Shaw once postulated that photi spells fish and he was right.  In grammar:  We were told to never split infinitives or end a sentence with a preposition (You want to go with? as Moe, Homer’s bartender, might ask). In writing: I once taught the argumentative essay using a book that had famous essays in back.  No one of these essays resembled in any way what we were doing in class.  I even had some doubts that the authors had any knowledge of what I was teaching in class. Fortunately, none of my forty or so night school students ever deigned to ask.  Yet, we try to persist in teaching English.  Bummer.

Don’t teach English, practice it.

A new paradigm might be to just forget about teaching English and just practice English.  At the very least, the idea that we should grade students in English the same way we do other ought to be largely disbanded.  Test them on vocabulary words if you must, but not on spelling, grammar or even reading comprehension.  Instead I think it is better to have students rehearse speeches about themselves, their families, and their country and give these speeches over and over.  In time their confidence will lead to fluency.  You may say this is a false fluency, but I say fluency is fluency.

There is a hierarchy in the way humans learn language.  You did it and I did it.  We all picked our language skills he same way.  First, we learn to listen to and speak a language, then we learn to read a language, and finally – way down the road – we learn to write a language.  If we miss the speaking part, all bets are off.  It is almost sinful to put reading comprehension on an English test for students who haven’t mastered speaking a language – but ESL TOEFL people do it.

Of course there are other elements of English that never get taught in ESL courses.  The joy of language is in its art, in its literature.  But I have never seen an ESL program that attempts literature even on the most basic level.  We teach a transactional product so students can say:  I give you a dollar; you give me a hot dog.  Somewhere the teaching of English has lost its soul, and I feel the world is a poorer place for it.

There are reasons why Thais are poor at English, and until we stop teaching English, they may never get any better.

FG   Nov. 11, 2015