A look into teaching English in Thailand
By: Abstract Magazine
Tags: Travel, Education, Life

Teaching a language abroad for two months was all it took for Rob Norris to decide that education is the right career path for him.

Watching your students improve while gaining confidence is a heartwarming, life-changing experience. Photo: Rob Norris

With the graduate job market being the tough beast it is to break into, many university graduates are looking to teach English as a foreign language overseas. Making money, travelling and gaining experience for that possible future PGCE is the ideal alternative to working long and unrewarding hours in an office job while living back home with the parents.

From mid-July to the start of September, I spent eight weeks teaching at a state elementary school in Thailand through the British Council. After arriving in Bangkok, I was shipped out to a farming village in the North-East of the country. For the following two months, I was to live with the headteacher of the school and his family. The headteacher was incredibly welcoming and desperate to have me help him improve his English. He happened to be a huge Liverpool Football Club fan, and was delighted when I gave him a coffee mug with the Liverpool badge on it as a gift from home.

The language barrier between myself and the community I was living in made the first few weeks difficult. It also took a while to get over the culture shock of seeing whole families riding together on a motorbike with no helmets on and the large number of stray dogs roaming the school grounds every day.

Overcoming culture shock and getting your head around teaching a class your native language when you cannot understand their own definitely takes time, but with the right mindset it can be done. I personally found that the best way to do this was to throw myself face first into the lives of the people in the village. On most evenings the children and adults would gather at the small concrete yard just outside of the school to play volleyball. When I walked past during my first weekend, I was pulled by some of my students into the game and before I knew it I was battling hard with the rest of the team to win the match. Volleyball soon became a regular past time during my stay and allowed me to connect with the students and their families outside of the classroom.

The actual teaching involved playing games with the children and making various worksheets for them to do together. Wordsearches went down well, with some classes demanding to do one every week. The Thai teacher of English at the school was a great help in roughly letting me know the ability of each group and we would often plan the lessons together.

Many of the children were gifted in English; some were even able to hold their own conversations about football or music, usually Korean pop groups. It was easy to get carried away showering these children with praise and forgetting about the kids who were struggling with grasping the language. This is where being a part of the local community helped. By spending weekends attending local ceremonies at the school or Buddhist temple, I was able to interact with them outside of school which increased their confidence in trying to communicate with me. Once the children realised they knew more English than I did Thai, they started trying to teach me their own language too.

I knew from the start that the children I taught in Thailand were not going to turn fluent in just two months, but seeing their confidence improve as they started stringing words together in English, and the fun they had doing it, was amazing to watch.

• To find out more about teaching English in Thailand, visit British Council.