I often tell the story of the young man who accosted me in the newspaper pictorial department many years ago.
"Hey you!" he said to me by way of catching my attention.
This salutation no longer raises my hackles like it used to. Not so much now, but for a long time Thais were taught that an acceptable way to garner the attention of a native English speaker was to use this obnoxious shout-out. Perhaps they learned it from the Rambo movies, or ancient-era aggressive Khao San Road teachers. I'd like to think I played an instrumental role in stamping it out, though if one travels to more remote parts, one still hears it.
Anyway, back to the young man in question.
He was no more than 21, sitting on a bench in the newspaper pictorial department, swinging his legs idly.
"I just come back from prathet you," he said with a smile.
"Australia? You just came back from Australia?"
"Yes same-same you!" he answered. "Sydney. You know, Sydney? I study Australia I like very much."
"Great," I said. I didn't bother to explain to him that yes, as an Australian, I did know Sydney. Instead I asked: "How long did you stay in Australia?"
He creased his forehead. Clearly he didn't understand. I repeated the question and he finally answered by raising a single finger.
"One week?" I asked.
"One year!" he beamed. "I stay one year! I like very much, you know?"
"And what were you studying in Sydney?"
More forehead creases. "Fung mai roo reuang," he said. I have no idea what you're saying.
The conversation continued in Thai. Continuing in English was just too much of a drag. He lacked the vocabulary and I lacked the patience -- this was at work after all.
The kid really threw me for a long time. I don't think I spent any sleepless nights pondering his situation, but it did unnerve me. How could you spend 12 months in a foreign country and not pick up the language -- especially since you were there at school learning it? Here was a guy who'd spent an entire year of his parents' savings in Sydney learning English, and what did he return with? Bad sentence construction, a lack of any past tense and an equal absence of the verb "to be" -- and we're not even taking that "Hey you!" into account either.
That kid -- who must now be in his mid-to-late-40s -- belonged to a generation of Thais who just couldn't win when it came to English-language learning. If they studied in Thailand, they were doomed to an inadequate curriculum and outmoded teaching approach. And if they went overseas?
Not much better. His story is a story that plays out a thousand times over.
He caught a Thai Airways international flight to the Sydney airport. His Thai friends picked him up from the airport. He shared an apartment with those four Thai friends from the same moo baan back in the Nakhon Boondocks. He got a job at a Thai restaurant on Oxford Street where he worked for substandard wages. When he finally got to the language school, there were 15 students in the class from just about every corner of the globe. What a pastiche of culture! There was even a single solitary Thai. He ran over to that Thai student and they sat together.
Do you start to get the picture? He lived, ate, slept, studied, worked with and played cards every night with Thais. In the meantime he ascertained the required pass rate for his class and worked towards achieving that minimum grade, which he managed to achieve thanks to rote learning of grammar rules and lucky guesswork on the multiple-choice part.
Thus he returned home, with the prestige of having studied overseas. What a catch for any prospective employee!
I was reminded of that kid this week, and indeed told his story to a group of 25 Thai students whom I met at TAFE Southbank college in Brisbane, Australia.
Yes, dear reader, I am writing this 7,300km from Bangkok in my hometown, back for a quick visit. While here I had the chance to meet that group of young Thais over here doing 24-, 36- and 48-week courses in English at TAFE, the Australian government's vocational colleges. There are about 120 young Thais studying here in Queensland, which I unabashedly push as an ideal place for Thais wanting to further their study overseas.
First of all, the good news. "We don't have problems with the Thai students -- not like [with those from] some other Asian countries," the man in charge of international students informed me -- and no, he wouldn't divulge who those rogue nations were. "They're diligent and very co-operative."
What I really wanted to know was whether things had changed in 25 years. Were Thai students still clustering together overseas?
I asked because at TAFE they were studying courses called English for Academic Purposes. They studied for four hours a day, five days a week. The curriculum covered the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking, plus work on grammar. Their text book was Cambridge.
"Stop right there," I said to them, a little dramatically. What they had just described was exactly the same as any intensive English course they could take in Bangkok, right down to the textbook. Why spend all that money coming over to Australia's Sunshine State?
"It's not so much what we do in the classroom," said one male student. "It's what we do outside."
Ah! The sound of a nail being hit right on the head.
Thailand always scrapes the barrel of English-language proficiency when compared to other countries. This year Thailand tumbled down to No.64 in the EF English Proficiency Index. Why is that? Is it genetic? Are Thai genes just not conducive to learning English?
Of course not. The big reason is that there's just no real compelling reason to know the language, other than to pass tests.
"I came from a school where we were forced to use English in the classroom," said Belle, one of the students in the group this week. "Once we left the classroom, we fell back into Thai."
"In Thailand we study to pass exams," said Nat, who recently finished a cookery course at TAFE. "It's not about learning the language. It's about passing the exam. That's why we're not so good.
"We can't stay with other Thais. If we do, we just don't get better at the language. I deliberately stayed away from other Thais, when I first got here. I needed to get confident. My feeling was, once I gained that initial confidence, and was able to communicate, that was when I returned to Thai society in Brisbane.
"In Thailand we have a comfort zone. We get good at English by stepping out of our comfort zone -- and creating a new one over here."
This was positive news, and proof that things are getting better. Maybe not this year, but attitudes are changing. Young students are a little more savvy. Newspaper pictorial departments have disappeared off the face of the earth in this digital era, and luckily, so too have a lot of those students like the one I met in the darkroom all those years ago.
And of course, like any language learning, it's what you do with it outside the classroom that really counts. We'll discuss this a little more next week when I report from Cairns in far North Queensland. It sure beats working.
