Teaching & Learning. Part One

Now they are trying vainly to reach the degree of language proficiency required by Universities in England, the USA and Australasia in order to enrol in a Ph D program and upgrade their qualifications in the manner to which their government is presently committed.

A major part of the problem seems to me that, both native Thais and foreign English-language teachers are trying to teach English through a traditional grammatical approach. And this, I am convinced, can never work.

Any attempt to describe modern English usage in terms of a grammar originally derived from classical Latin is quite hopeless, while the structure of the Thai language is so different from any European language that it is even difficult for them to comprehend some of the grammatical terms used by language teachers.

Don't think that I know what the right method of teaching a Western language (and I think that we must include Esperanto in this category) to people from SE Asia, Japan, Korea and China. I certainly don't and when I return to Thailand next month, I am going to have to find out!

But I do know that the teaching methods and materials widely used now in Thailand are not wholly reliable and not very effective. For example, I did a careful check through a short textbook on advanced English produced by a Thai university. There was a section (not very long) of English idioms. There were 22 mistakes. In a short list of English proverbs, there were 20 mistakes. And the section on so-called "irregular" verbs had many serious errors. (One, I remember, described the past participles of the verb "to be guilty" as "gilt" or "gilded".)

Well, for some reason, Esperanto teachers seem to have felt the need for an alternative approach to language teaching for a very long time...certainly since before World War One. And, for the next few weeks, I am going to try to evaluate some of these new methods.

I suspect that I will need some help from those talented and experienced Esperantists who have made such valuable contributions to this topic in the past. Don't fail me now, friends!

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