English plan a case of the blind leading the blind

I was surprised to read that Deputy Education Minister Teerakiat Jareonsettasin, the first Thai minister to have appointed a foreigner as his official adviser, plans to cut the number of foreign English tutors and implement a programme to produce Thais to train English home-grown English teachers. Also, his revelation that only six among the 43,000 Thai teachers of English are fluent in the language prompted me to wonder what has his ministry has been doing. After decades of obvious failures in Thais’ efforts to master English, the proposal to train some teachers as guides for their colleagues seems like a case of the blind leading the blind.

Meanwhile Burin Kantabutra’s suggestion that all these teachers must achieve a TOEFL exam pass mark of first 300 then 400 points is a quick way of humiliating them. The ministry would be wise instead to first test a sample of teachers and check the results. Otherwise we could end up with a big shortage of English teachers. I would be surprised if many could even achieve the rather low bar of 300 points. And improving to a score of 400 within one year is unheard of. 

Songdej Praditsmanont