Is it standard to have a certain level of social engineering in the Thai university system?

Postbox letter from Humanities dept. University teaching

I don't think I've seen such blatant disregard for foreigners ever.

Making the transition

Reasons why people teach English and the possible career paths

Foreign ESL teachers in Thailand or other parts in Asia are a diverse lot and have many different motivations for teaching abroad.

Transforming lesson plans into modules

Plans to develop a better school curriculum

Teachers who use their own modules know very well the advantages they bring to classroom teaching and professional development.

What to do about academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and direct copying?

Postbox letter from Mike

How do the teachers working in Thailand handle direct copying and obvious plagiarism?

Is it wise for a foreign teacher to complain in Thailand?

Postbox letter from Siri Herath

Misunderstandings and problems with an over-zealous assistant

Teaching at my university

What does holding down a university job entail?

if you want to teach university classes like mine, in particularly regard to Thai classes, if they are school leavers they’re really as good a bunch of starters as you could ever hope to get. If you try and teach them in a systematic way, you will encounter difficulties – difficulties that might, at first, be inclined to plunge you into the deepest depths of despair.

Culture revisited

A continuing analysis of 'culture'

There is a lot of convenience to the idea that ‘our cultures are very different’. This was never plainer than in the era of (blatant) Western imperialism – I’ve said previously that cultural studies writers speak of ‘orientalism’, which, loosely defined, means disparaging other people because you want to put them to utilitarian purposes.

Did you plan it?

Getting to grips with student compositions

To say that it is sometimes difficult to fix a student's written work is somewhat of an understatement; it would be truer to say that it is an excruciating process, one that is often impossible unless you have the author on hand to provide a bit of interpretation.

who speaks English well?

An impossible question to answer

If we compare Thais to Koreans, Japanese or Chinese, who comes out on top in the English language speaking stakes? Well, exactly how easy are these things to judge and what criteria are we going to base our evaluations on?