'WE No Speak ENGLISH'

The Kingdom clearly has its work cut out for it. Thailand's educational system focuses on rote learning, which dissuades students from independent thinking and merely expects them to regurgitate pre-packaged bits of data and information with nary a thought about their use, validity or importance.

The result is that Thai students tend to fare poorly on even basic general knowledge tests. And routinely, despite often learning English (and other languages) for years, they can barely communicate in the global lingua franca beyond speaking a jumbled pidgin variety of the tongue, If that.

Most foreign English teachers in the Kingdom are familiar with the peculiar phenomenon of Thai students who major in English at colleges and universities and yet can barely string a coherent sentence together in the foreign tongue, let alone communicate effectively in it. The best many Thai students manage is to shyly parrot pre-taught sentences, with "How are you? I am fine, thank you and you?" being the most common.

And that despite the fact that English has been a core subject in Thailand for decades. Invariably, the fault lies with the teachers themselves. A fairly recent study, in collaboration with Cambridge University, of Thai teachers of English found that a staggering 60 percent of them barely spoke the language adequately themselves, many of them could not speak it well enough to teach basic English even in primary school.

Often, for want of qualified teachers, members of faculty who could manage a few words on English had simply been pressed into service at English Classes by school administrators. Not surprisingly, of the remaining 40 percent of teachers surveyed, only half were teaching grades for which they were qualified. Overall, only a meagre 3 percent of teachers had passable levels of fluency in English at all. On a final insult, at some primary schools students scored higher or random language tests than their teachers did.

Schools and educational authorities have set out to remedy the problem of poor language teaching standards by subjecting Thai teachers to more rigorous testing and training programs. They have also been working to hire more native English speakers. Both are worthwhile efforts. The latter, however, has been undermined somewhat by the inadequate screening of candidates at several institutions, which means that native speakers teaching English to Thai students at various ages often lack the necessary academic credentials and teaching qualifications for the job.