There seem to be more and more people around with an interest in learning Thai, and the most common problem they face is the fact that Thai is a tonal language. Personally, I have never made an effort to learn the tone rules – my language acquisition comes purely from the listen and repeat method, in the same way that a child would learn its mother tongue.

It did however get me thinking about how we use tones in English which reminded me of a hilarious sketch I saw many years ago where a reporter on TV read the classified results with the wrong intonation. If you were listening only to the tone rather than the words it gave the impression that the wrong team had won.

As everybody (English anyway) knows this Saturday afternoon ritual, it can be used to practice the 5 Thai tones. Let’s start with a home win

Arsenal 3 – Manchester United 1 - the 3 would be the Thai rising tone and the 1 would be the Thai falling tone.

To master the mid tone think of a score draw e.g. Liverpool 1 – Chelsea 1 – easy!

The low tone can also be mastered by thinking of the most boring 90 minutes of football ending in a 0-0 draw, e.g. Aston Villa 0 – Everton 0.

Finally for the high tone you just have to think of the most incredible result from a high scoring game

e.g. Manchester City 5 – Newcastle 7

It’s important to note that it’s only the score not the team name that gets the tone – here’s a recap.

Arsenal 3 (R) - Manchester United 1 (F)
Liverpool 1 (M) – Chelsea 1 (M)
Aston Villa 0 (L) – Everton 0 (L)
Manchester City 5 (H) – Newcastle 7 (H)

(H) High Tone, (R) Rising Tone, (M) Mid Tone, (F) Falling Tone, (L) Low Tone

Del

A letter from the Teachers Council of Thailand (TCT) recently circulated social media, causing quite a stir among Thailand’s foreign teacher community.

In basic terms, it states that foreigners applying for their teaching permit, must ask their university to send a degree verification letter on official paper, with an official seal enclosed in an official envelope direct to the TCT’s office. The letter must clearly confirm that applicants have successfully completed their degree. Sounds like a standard transcript, right? Whether it is or not, the letter is indicative of the TCT’s capricious nature.

One comment on the Thailand Teaching forum read, “Yet another policy that is not officially published on the website or communicated to teachers in any way; we are left to discover it by accidental misfortune.”

That’s one of the more level-headed comments we read and before anyone could suggest we all keep calm and pass the somtam, foreign teachers all over the internet were doing their best Chicken Little impersonations.

“If they want to lose all the legit teachers, that’s the way to do it.” posted one member of Facebook’s ESL Teachers in Thailand group.

Another replied soon after, “Good luck to Thailand because there won’t be any teachers left in the country within a couple of months.”

Perhaps most reactionary comments is typified here, “I can’t help but get the impression that the [TCT] isn’t particularly happy with the idea of foreign teachers in Thailand.”

Back to the land of reason and rationale, many comments mentioned legitimate pitfalls, “Sending directly to the (TCT) seems like a recipe for lost mail and no one being held accountable when the paperwork fails, causing chaos for teachers and schools.”

Another good point relates to documents not written in English, “A verification letter from a German, French or Italian uni would need to be translated, which is difficult to do through a sealed envelope!”

Still another good point relates to schools’ name changes, ““My university has a different name so I don’t know how this would work. The headed paper and seal would be of a different name to that on my certificate!”

While some claim the sky is falling, others (including the author of this article) fully expect this regulation to disappear as quietly and quickly as it started. Any foreigner teacher who’s worked in Thailand for a few years knows how routinely regulations come and go. How do we know?

First, since 2006 the TCT’s Thai Culture, Ethics and Language Course (a requirement for all foreigners) has started and stopped more times than we can remember. The TCT’s Professional Knowledge Tests are currently in limbo, despite hundreds of teachers spending tens of thousands of baht to pass them. And as recently as last August, the head of immigration was sidelined just after he announced that his department would adhere to its own directives and stop allowing back-to-back entries on tourist visas.

If past behaviour is an indicator of future behaviour, it seems reasonable to expect that the TCT will see the error of its ways, or at least be forced to do so and accept transcripts in place of these verification letters. Let’s just hope that happens before the pot stirrers gain any more unfounded momentum

Eric Haeg

I have a few comments for would-be teacher applicants when sending in your application e-mails or in person applications.

KISS... Keep It Simple and Succinct.

The majority of potential employers in Thailand are not going to understand the finesse of a finely tuned resume written in politically correct and flowery context for your home country :
Stick to the points (relevant education and employment).

Anything else should be in the cover letter.

Every potential employer hiring teachers is looking for the same things:

Scan of your Passport (citizenship and validity)
Scan of your Degree (makes you legal to become a teacher).
Scan of your transcript of records (TOR) or other proof of program from your Uni - a KSP requirement.
Scan of a recent police clearance (you want to work with kids - employers and parents want to know.)

If you are NOT a Native Speaker (not one of the 6 "correct" passports) then you NEED to have a valid TOEIC score certificate and the scan should be attached.

Although not a "requirement" if you have a TEFL certificate it would also be appropriate to add a scan to your application.

Leave the rest of the "certificates" off of it.
For entry level EFL work they don't matter.
If you are looking for something higher up the food chain then list them as an appendix to your resume. The employer doesn't want 25 megabytes of scans of your 1-day seminars clogging up his inbox.

Dave

I am originally from India, have been teaching English in Thailand for over 6 years and have recently been an EFL lecturer at a reputed government university. I have decided to move on from my current job and find that even after all these years of experience and a M.A in TESOL, it is very difficult for me to find another job as almost all jobs these days explicitly or otherwise state that they will not entertain applications from non- Caucasians or non- Filipinos.

This is the epitome of discrimination in Thailand. I am thinking that realistically I'll have to move on to doing my Ph.D. and continue teaching in other parts of the world, where hopefully there are non-racist people. and the focus is SKILL, not SKIN.

Purnima

This writing is in response to an article I read about linguistics and language in the blogs. It was closed and I couldn't post there.

I have been teaching for many years abroad and I found that most text in Asia are UK based but the spoken language tends to be American style. This influence comes from media mostly and marketing. I have no problem with British English although from the American point of view it is somewhat uppity and rigid.

Every student and teacher I have trained preferred the American style. Yes, we use the British text but the differences are minor and easily explained. My complaint is English has way too many words for the same thing. We could remove many words and make it much more simpler. However, that would be asking a lot from all English speakers and considered watering down. Oh, well.

British English was empirical as was the nature of the empire. American capitalist were not so sharing for free and thus the written and colonial style was until decolonization British. So what happened. The answer is WAR.

The US military as had a permanent presence in Asia for many years now. It actually began during the Spanish American War with the Philippines then WW2, Korea, Vietnam and so forth.

We did not bring text books or teachers we brought money and innovation, new ideas and business opportunities. In essence, capitalism which is American by design pushed out British influence in favor of greed. Therefore, business English appeared and it evolved into what it is today.

What I do find interesting is this. My son was born and raised in the UK. His mother is British. It is all he knows. I also have a guy from New Zealand I work with, and I have met many friends from British Commonwealths. To the letter I find they cannot understand American English nor read 50% of it with comprehension. Yet, any American can read any text from the UK, listen to conversations, and view their media and understand it completely. The only exception are people from Australia, who have been profoundly impacted from the US and seem to understand us fine. So I wonder what the real problem is.

It isn't any wonder people prefer the American English to other forms. Accents and idioms excluded, the basic form of English is the same.

The only complaints I ever hear are from British and New Zealanders who just don't quite understand the most widely spoken form of their base language in the world. My director is one of these people.

Recently he made it clear that he only wanted to hire teachers from New Zealand because he believes their curriculum and language pronunciation is the only legitimate language to be taught. Simply amazing!

Better to be deaf and sign

Robert

It all started a long time ago in a land far far away. Like-minded people gathered asking questions, they would seek out teachers who would help them to better understand the world and their lives. From Socrates to Pericles, to Plato and Aristotle education began with the noblest and purest of intentions. Socrates refused payment for his teaching as he believed that knowledge should not only be given just to those who could afford it.

What follows are my thoughts following ten years of prostituting off my mother tongue to the highest bidder around Southeast Asia. For many of my experiences the setting has almost always been in schools, but sadly the subject has seldom been education.

Native English Speaking Teachers – A Soldier in an Army of Linguistic Missionaries

The teachers you get coming to Southeast Asia are some of life’s most unique individuals. 95% of them fall in to one of the two following categories.

Type ones come to teach in Southeast Asia to avoid debt or custodial sentences, they are too far gone to hang on to the coattails of social acceptability in their native countries, too introverted, too extroverted or just too perverted to fit in anywhere else. They wander through the countries of Southeast Asia with a head full of confused grammar and loose morals.

Then you get those poor bastards who come here unaware as to just how depraved and twisted this place is. They leave behind good jobs, with good prospects, and find themselves teaching in an educational vacuum, desperately trying to cling on to the values they know to be true, but they dare not utter. Right away these people know they have entered an environment where knowledge is not just ignored but aggressively attacked. It is a place where black can be white, where sometimes two plus two does equal five and where it can be considered just too damn dangerous to have fire drills.

In ten years I have seen many different types of teachers pass through schools, I’ve seen a few pass out in classrooms too. At first being an expat and working in a school was weird, it was like mixing the most mindbending twisted holiday at night, with a responsible job during daylight hours.

Needless to say such compartmentalization of these two disparate worlds was not always possible. On one occasion I recall a teacher turning up for work at three o’clock in the afternoon because they had an appointment with the principal about the renewal of his contract. Exactly when he’d started drinking and if indeed he had actually stopped, it was impossible to tell, he had to look for work elsewhere.

Ten years ago you were unlikely to find a teacher sober before lunchtime, indeed you would be lucky to find many teachers in school prior to lunchtime. A decade ago you could and did do anything, drinking until three in the morning when you started teaching at eight was nothing unusual.

Times have changed, things have become more serious. Maybe I’ve just changed and become sober.

Globalization, Indoctrination and Linguistic Imperialism

Why is there such a need for English to be taught around the world? Why is English the lingua franca? Why is it that these countries must have native English speakers teaching their children, after all when I learned French I did so from an English person? Could it be that it is all bullshit?

There has been a long held belief that a western education is better. In turn there is that western teachers must also be better. These are beliefs that are consistently reinforced through linguistic imperialism, defined as: "the dominance asserted and retained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages."
Phillipson, Robert (1992),

English is the language of capitalism and a vital tool of the global hegemony. The ceaseless reinforcement of the importance of the English language through the pervasive international marketing of American brands, and rhetoric used by institutions like the British Council. English is accepted by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the common language.

It is reasonable to expect that in a world of such international trade that there must be a common language, in this case English, but that in no way means that native English speaking countries provide the best education nor necessarily the best teachers to teach the English language.
Last years report by the Organization for Economic and Cultural Diversity (OECD) showed how these five countries fared against one another:

Literacy Maths Science
Singapore 3 2 3
Japan 4 7 4
Korea 5 5 7
United Kingdom 23 26 21
United States 24 36 28

Obviously these results are unflattering to the two major English speaking countries, even more so when you consider that Singapore’s language of instruction is English and they severely out performed both the United States and the United Kingdom in literacy. This raises the question would Singaporean English teachers be more effective teachers of English to Southeast Asian children? Simply the answer is yes - but they would command huge salaries.

So why are native English speaking teachers still in so much demand throughout Southeast Asia? There remains a belief, that still carries some truth, that a degree from the west is of greater value than a degree from a Southeast Asian country. Whilst this may be true the only thing that prevents Southeast Asian students from getting a degree from a western university is the cash.

Nowadays having the financial resources is more important than having the academic ability. Western Universities are run like businesses and they charge a premium for foreign students. This brings us back to where we started and Socrates refusing to be paid as knowledge should not only be given to those that can afford it. Truth be told though no knowledge has to be given, nor often is, just a degree certificate that proved you paid to attend a university for three years.

Education, in particular English language education in foreign countries has become an industry, which feeds off of, and reinforces the beliefs of linguistic imperialism. What must be held as most important is what a student is capable of learning, not what language they are capable of learning it in.

The truth is nobody but the students should profit from education.

Looking back upon my 10 years in Southeast Asia I can state categorically that linguistic imperialism rocks, it has allowed me to live for a decade, the first half of which was spent indulging in such hedonistic debauchery it would have made Nero blush, comfortably in Southeast Asia. Yes there might be some moral questions that remain unanswered, but so long as I’m alright I’ll just keep turning a blind eye and a deaf ear.

Frankly Speaking

At the risk of adding fuel to the fire for those that like to shoot down the Filipinos (or other NNES) teaching staff - be careful.

Yes, there are Filipinos (and others) who have no business here. Their language skills are substandard. Their TOEIC scores are in the 500-600 range. They are NOT teachers. They have NO teaching qualification of any kind.
They get hired simply because they can speak English better than the Thai staff at the school who hired them or they get hired by dodgy agencies over the next candidate who is qualified simply because they are cheaper but the agencies hire them and pass them off as "English teachers" anyway.

On the flip (no pun intended) side of that coin are those Filipinos who are qualified. They are trained teachers (degrees or post-grad diplomas in educational fields) with a good understanding of pedagogy, classroom management skills and and an excellent command of English (often better than the NES tourist teachers who abound in Thailand).

To those unqualified teachers... whatever your passport color, whether you are paid 30k for your "correct passport" or 15k for your lack of one, you are overpaid and have no business near a classroom.

To those qualified teachers with teaching qualifications, teaching licenses, 750-990 TOEIC scores, etc) - you should be paid better. 15,000 is too low (unless benefits like housing, significant vacation time (with pay) and bonuses are added onto that).

NES Teacher

I appreciate the reactions to my previous post, in the Ajarn website and Facebook page, be it good or bad criticism. I understand some would not agree with Filipinos earning a higher or same wage equivalent to that of a native speaker for reasons of being from a country of lower education ranking (Education in the Philippines 12 Sept 2014) but that argument does not prove anything and is irrelevant.

Here's a fact, almost anywhere in the world you will find a Filipino worker. There are 2.2 million Filipinos around the world working in various occupations, and why? That's because we can read, write, speak or even sing better in the English language. Thanks to the Americans, we can communicate anywhere around the globe.

Today we have a booming BPO industry with call centers servicing countries like the US, UK and Australia. We can communicate very well for Fortune 500 companies to trust us with their clients and customers. There are numerous Filipino teachers in the US and Australia, teaching English and other subjects in English, earning much more than the 'pittance' that native speakers are earning in Thailand.

My point is, Filipino teachers and other non-native English speaking foreigners in Thailand are also foreigners, we also have to do visas and work permits, we also have to spend more because of the odd inconveniences a foreigner gets of living in this country. So why can't all foreigners (all nationalities) get around the same minimum salary rate? Is being a "native speaker" really the reason why schools employ with higher wage?

We all know that when they mean NES, that means caucasian. It's a fact that they base their salaries on the color of your skin (suffering because of my Thainess 11 Sept 2014) So, in this day and age why discriminate? This was meant for Thai school employers and Filipinos but why are some foreigners reacting negatively to my previous post? We all know you have no control with teacher's salaries but would it really bother you if Filipinos and other Non-NES have the same wage as yours? If it does, then you must be from a very primitive and bigoted society. Keep up with the times, it's 2014 already.

What I meant to achieve with my previous post is to cultivate a sense of value to fellow Filipinos, so they may try to find work that pays more than 15k baht, and steer away from schools that offer that amount, after all, Filipinos are worth more than that.

pinoyguy

Just a quick response to some of the letters I've been reading regarding Filipinos and salaries offered (and accepted). I agree that the salaries are far too low and that people should not continue to accept such. Nevertheless, good luck with that unionization-style thinking. From what I'm hearing more and more teachers are coming in from Cameroon, Nigeria, etc.

I for one am also fed up with farang teachers settling for a pittance just because "quality of life, mate" and other such excuses I hear. It really only hurts the cause for everyone else, as the industry seems to think NES will work for 25k baht.

Oh, and Pinoyguy...honestly are you crowing about working for free on weekends and unpaid overtime? Please don't. If an employer wants us to work more hours then fine, but there needs to be a little more benefits given our way too in that case. I don't know about everyone else, but I didn't spend so much time and money at university to work unpaid. The school owner has enough "mia nois", no need to help him finance another one with unpaid overtime.

I shudder to think what the future of this industry looks like. Salaries haven't moved up at all in what, at last ten years. It seems the salaries are actually going down, and it's work ethics and attitudes such as that which contribute to it.

Bill

A quick google of world/asian/asean rankings will show that the education system of the Philippines is regularly placed below that of Thailand. Basic education in the Philippines is often 10 or 11 years. Tertiary education is often three years. It is, in principle, possible to graduate with a "university degree" in the Philippines before the age of twenty. The (usually somewhat better) Thai basic/tertiary education is 12/4 years. NES teachers (who have genuine credentials) typically have world-class educations.

Some people might also have noticed that an application for a work permit is linked to salary for foreign workers which in turn is linked to where you come from. Sorry to all my Filipino colleagues out there but if you are world class go and look for a job in "farangland."

george graham