As AEC nears, members work on better English

 This is being driven by growing global connectivity and the setting up of the Asean Economic Community (AEC), which will force countries in Southeast Asia and other Asian regions to relate to each other more.

Representatives from a range of Asian nations spoke at a seminar on foreign language promotion and strategy held in Bangkok by the Office of the Education Council (OEC) and Naresuan University to study policies on foreign language teaching.

Thailand and South Korea share similar problems and challenges in improving their English language standards.

Sung-Hye Kim, from the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, said Korean children’s English language writing and speaking skills were low. Previously teachers focused on grammar and reading while teaching in class. So they changed their techniques – rather than just having students learn English to pass exams, teachers tried to get them to have fun while studying English for communication, Kim said.

Thailand, meanwhile, has encouraged its students to speak English after finding that teaching mainly grammar does little to help them speak out.

“The Education Ministry of Thailand has announced English Speaking Year and that students in primary and secondary levels are encouraged to speak English for the whole day on every Monday. IT has [also] been used to help English-language teachers to improve their techniques, Assoc Prof Chantana Chanbanjong, from Naresuan University, said.

South Korea has used the Internet to help students practice speaking and answering questions in English, while periods for learning English in primary school have been increased. 

Prof Bao Tianren, from China’s Tertiary Education Research Association (Foreign Language Training), said it had promoted English as the second language for students. Students who wanted to take a university entrance exam would have to pass a national English test and those seeking bachelor degrees had to pass English tests too. The country would continue improving its English testing standards, he said.

China has problems similar to Thailand. Bao said around half of Chinese teachers in English had not graduated with a bachelor degree in English, and most of their textbooks were from English-speaking countries, so the content and activities in them were not related to Chinese culture.

Indonesia, meanwhile, faces a lack of teachers. “Of 2.9 million teachers, only 100,000 – or 4.4 per cent – teach English language,” Prof Adeng Chaedar Alwasilah, from the Indonesia University of Education, said.

The Indonesian representative said his government was looking at a genre-based approach that has been used in Australia to teach English – to see if it should use this technique with secondary students. However, Indonesia gives priority to local dialects, followed by the national language. So, English is the third language there. 

In Laos, teaching foreign languages is new. State schools don’t do it – only private schools teach foreign languages, such as English, French, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. And most textbooks for primary schools come from Thailand. Thongsouk Keomany, from Laos’ Ministry of Education, said there was a shortage of instructional media, especially in remote areas. 

OEC Secretary General Anek Permvongseni said he hoped the seminar could help education agencies learn from what other countries were doing, and seek new English teaching techniques to upgrade Thai students’ proficiency so they are prepared for the AEC, which is due to open in 2015.