Never mind English tests, just answer this simple question
I am a native speaker of (American) English who taught for 15 years at a major Thai university. Long ago I devised a simple, one-question oral test to determine the English-speaking competency of any Thai. The question is: "What is the plural form of 'chi
The answer, of course, is “children”, but most Thai people pronounce the “ch” sound as “sh”. Any Thai who pronounces “children” correctly (“church” is another possibility) is almost guaranteed to be an expert at speaking English. The biggest problem Thais have in speaking English is pronunciation. They can understand one another when they speak English, but foreigners often can’t.
Here are some other words that make good pronunciation tests, to be written down and then read aloud: thrilled, national, parallelogram, goat, ghost, ghosts. The Thai tongue has difficulty with the “th” sound, with “r” and “l”, with final consonants, and with consonant clusters.
The problem is compounded with upcountry students. Often their teachers’ English pronunciation is substandard, so the students have had faulty pronunciation drilled into their brains. My heart has always gone out to the eager young upcountry students with the delusion that their English is flawless who then discover that their ajarn farang can’t understand half of what they say. Particularly memorable were a girl who gave a speech on bullfighting and kept referring to “de boo” and a girl who gave a speech on “back fai” (black flies).
Thai educators need to devise a workable system of teaching correct English pronunciation and really hammer on it. My own efforts, drilling students with minimal pairs (“rip-lip”, “tree-three”), were an abject failure. After much practice, students could pronounce the sounds correctly, but after the drills they reverted to normal speech. I wish the Education Ministry luck in solving this largely unrecognised problem.
Thai people shouldn’t feel too bad about this, though, because I’m sure they have many jokes about foreigners’ pronunciation of Thai. I learned this the hard way at the beginning of one course when I read the class roll aloud and came to the name of a Miss Rouangourai. After many vain attempts at pronouncing her name, and much hilarity from the class, I finally settled on calling her Miss R.
S Tsow (“Mr T”)
