Phuket Opinion: Wakeup Call To The Value Of English

[Lite Beer]

Phuket Opinion: Wakeup call to the value of English

Phuket Gazette –

Most people who identified themselves as Thai thought English-language proficiency of local Thais were good or excellent, while foreign local residents and tourists rated them as poor or incomprehensible. Image: Gazette Graphics

PHUKET: Results of the latest Phuket Gazette online readers’ poll indicate stark differences in perception among foreigners and Thais about the level of English-language proficiency among locals working in the tourism industry here. Most people who identified themselves as Thai thought these skills were good or excellent, while foreign local residents and tourists rated them as poor or incomprehensible.

Although the number of native English-speaking tourists who visit Phuket every year is not growing at the same rate as those who speak Russian and Chinese, few would argue that English will remain the most important medium of communication in the tourism industry in the foreseeable future.

Going back decades, the mainstream Thai education system has consistently failed to produce graduates with sufficient skills to effectively communicate in English. This failure is perhaps best demonstrated in areas such as Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, where vendors selling knickknacks to foreigners are very often deaf mutes, whose ability to communicate through hand gestures apparently surpasses the English-language abilities of speaking people who might otherwise aspire to such work. Here in Phuket, of course, such jobs as “street touts” are more commonly held by people from neighboring states, even though such work is clearly restricted under Thai labor law to Thai nationals.

The sad reality is that in most government schools in the Kingdom, Thai teachers of English language themselves lack real communicative ability. The result is that in the classroom Thai language remains the medium of instruction, with incorrect pronunciation and word-meaning errors passed from one generation to the next, with further reinforcement through the mass media.

Fortunately, our increasingly cosmopolitan island is home to a large number and variety of privately-run schools that offer genuine alternatives. These start with nurseries and kindergartens that offer parents a way to expose their children to English as spoken by native speakers as early as possible, which is the best possible building block for future proficiency.

Unfortunately, this situation virtually ensures that English-language proficiency among Thais will largely remain where it has for decades: another privilege of the rich. With the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) economic integration scheme just two years away, this inequitable status quo is one we can no longer afford to maintain – and distributing tablet computers to six-year-olds is not the answer.

As to the poll results, we suspect Thais’ strong sense of nationalism, and false positive reinforcement of the level of their English-language skills, may have skewed the results they delivered. The Phuket Gazette hopes this is the case, because the first step to solving a problem is to recognize it exists.

Source: http://www.phuketgazette.net/archives/articles/2012/article16155.html

-- Phuket Gazette 2012-06-10

[NomadJoe]

Where the problem is really noticeable is in the Thai run English language media which is at times unintelligible.