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Non-native English-speaking teachers, context and English language teaching
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
System 37 (2009) 1–11 www.elsevier.com/locate/system
Non-native English-speaking teachers, context and English language teaching David Hayes * Department of Applied Linguistics, Brock University, St Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada Received 17 August 2007; received in revised form 27 May 2008; accepted 9 June 2008
Abstract This article contends that, in spite of a recent upsurge in writing on non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in the global discourse of English language teaching (ELT), the experiences of NNESTSs working within their own state educational systems remain seriously under-investigated. To help to redress this, the article explores, from their own perspectives, how a group of NNESTs experience English teaching in Thailand, where English is taught as a foreign language. Though the article only has space to consider two aspects of the teachers’ lives and careers – classroom methods and commitment to teaching – it is hoped that it will contribute to an understanding of the many and varied locally-based practices of ELT, as well as helping to correct a monolithic view of ELT based on western conceptions of practice. The importance of NNESTs of English being ‘native’ in terms of their situational teaching competence is, accordingly, given due weight. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs); Teaching behaviour; Teacher professionalism
1. Introduction It remains a measure of the condition of the field of ELT1 that ‘‘expertise is defined and dominated by native speakers” (Canagarajah, 1999a, p. 85; see also Holliday, 2005), and that, as a consequence – though the situation is changing – the experiences and perceptions of non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs)2 feature disproportionately little in the professional academic discourse despite their overwhelming numerical majority. This article contends that there is a need to bring the experiences of
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Tel.: +1 (905) 688 5550x5359. E-mail address: [email protected] 1 I have chosen to use the term ELT (English language teaching) as a convenient acronym for what is a complex scenario where English is taught variously as a second, subsequent or foreign language. 2 I recognise that ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ are linguistically and conceptually problematic terms (see, e.g. Rampton, 1990). However, as they are still common in the worldwide discourse of ELT, I shall use them here for lack of generally accepted alternatives. 0346-251X/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.system.2008.06.001
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NNESTs working within their own state educational systems to the forefront of the ELT professional discourse in order to redress significant imbalances in our knowledge base. To do so is important because, to adapt a comment from Berns et al. (1999, p. 138), ‘‘what is of concern is the value and necessity of hearing actual voices and views from the periphery that provide rich perspectives on and insights into the complexity of English [language teaching] worldwide.” This then has the potential to inform discussions about an ‘‘ecological perspective” on language teaching in which ‘‘understanding the reality of teaching involves exploring the meaning it has for students, for teachers, and for the others who, in one way or another, influence what is done in classrooms” (Tudor, 2001, p. 9). The ‘reality of teaching’ will, of course, vary from context to context. Accordingly, in this article I shall explore aspects of the realities of English teaching in one country where English is a foreign language – Thailand – as experienced by NNESTs themselves. In doing this I shall rely primarily on the perspectives of the teachers themselves, expressed in their own words, gathered through in-depth interviewing. To uncover the experiences of NNESTs in context is important, not least because, as Harmer (2003, p. 338) says ‘‘the social context in which learning takes place is of vital importance to the success of the educational endeavour”. Thai teachers of English are teachers in the Thai state educational system first and foremost: they are government officials with permanent, pensionable positions. It is this social context which centres their lives as teachers and impacts upon their classroom decision-making. Thai teachers in the Thai educational system may be ‘non-native’ speakers of the language they teach, but they are ‘native’ in terms of their situational teaching competence – which is as much a part of their professional expertise as language competence (Shin and Kellogg, 2007). 2. NNESTs and ELT The scale of NNEST populations worldwide is immense. For example, Bolton (2004, p. 388) has calculated that in China alone the number of secondary school teachers of English totals some 500,000. In the much smaller country discussed in this article, Thailand, there are 63,450 teachers teaching English to some 9.6 million schoolchildren3. What is it that they do every day in their classrooms? How do they teach? What do they think about teaching and about being teachers? These dimensions of NNEST in countries such as Thailand are rarely explored. There have, however, been some important investigations of the experiences of NNESTs. Comparisons have been made between NNESTs and NESTs to uncover differences in aspects of teaching behaviour (see ´ rva and Medgyes, 2000; Medgyes, 1999; Shin and Kellogg, 2007). There have also been investigations e.g. A of instructional practices in particular contexts with a specific focus on representations of communicative language teaching (CLT) approaches. Hu (2005), for example, gathered data from Chinese students on their teachers’ classroom practices while Mitchell and Lee (2003) contrasted French language teaching in the UK with EFL teaching in Korea. Another notable study (Tsui, 2003) documented the development of expertise amongst a group of NNESTs in Hong Kong. The overtly ideological nature of ELT and its instantiation in a periphery community are the subject of Canagarajah (1999b). NNESTs have also reflected on their experiences as teachers within the educational systems of English-speaking countries (see e.g. Pacek, 2005, and the various papers in Braine, 1999); reported on perceived identities as native/non-native teachers (Inbar-Lurie, 2005); and, in one notable collection, set personal biographies as NNESTs alongside accounts of the history of ELT in their countries (Braine, 2005). However, these works aside, the active agency of NNESTs as teachers within their own educational systems is insufficiently explored when we consider the numbers of teachers involved. We still know comparatively little about the careers and classroom lives of teachers of English in countries such as Thailand from their own perspectives; and it seems valid to echo Medgyes’ (2000, p. 445) conclusion that ‘‘On the whole, the study of the non-native teacher remains a largely unexplored area in language education”. 3 I am grateful to Ajarn Laddawan Songka, Ministry of Education, Bangkok, for providing these figures. The number of teachers includes class teachers at the primary level who teach English amongst other subjects, as well as specialist English teachers usually teaching at secondary level.
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3. The research approach 3.1. Methodology Data for this article was gathered through in-depth, unstructured interviews with seven Thai teachers of English, each interview lasting between 2 and 3½ hours. Interviews were conducted in English though informants occasionally used Thai where they felt it necessary to convey a concept or a particular piece of information for which they could not think of the English equivalent. The interviews had a broad focus on the informants’ educational experiences as learners and teachers within their social contexts and a list of topic areas was used as a framework for discussion (see Appendix). The list did not, however, constrain the discussion and throughout the interviews I remained open to any topic informants wished to raise. As can be seen from the list, the interviews were wide ranging and it would not be possible to examine the entire range of topics in an article of this length. The over-arching research question was: What is the subjective experience of these informants in the state education system in Thailand with respect to their experiences as teachers within their own context throughout their careers? In this particular article I wish to focus on the following sub-set of research questions. (1) What are informants’ subjective perceptions of their classroom lives: what influences and shapes their classroom practice? (2) What are the sources of the informants’ commitment to teaching? The unstructured interviews aimed to provide answers to the research questions by opening a window of understanding onto how these teachers made sense of the social world of teaching which they inhabited (Snape and Spencer, 2003). Within this framework, the conduct of the interview itself was of paramount importance and all writers on interviewing as a research technique (see e.g. Chirban, 1996; Kvale, 1996; Rubin and Rubin, 2005) agree that interviewing of this type should strive to be ‘‘more like a conversation between partners than between a researcher and a subject” (Schutt, 1999, p. 304). But when there is inevitably a power imbalance in most interview situations, the undertones of researcher and researched roles resonating throughout the process, achieving this conversationality is a skilled process which requires practice. Interviews for this study were only conducted after I had known the participants for some time; with five of the seven participants being long-standing professional colleagues dating back to my first involvement in the Thai educational system more than fifteen years ago. This familiarity with context and with the research participants had both advantages and disadvantages: advantages in that I, as researcher, shared a great deal of contextual knowledge and could be seen as an empathetic rather than a detached outsider; disadvantages in that the prior relationship might have influenced what informants chose to reveal, what Goodson and Sikes (2001, p. 25) have termed a danger of ‘working in one’s own backyard’. In response I should note that my full-time involvement in the context had ceased by the time these interviews were made and that I had, therefore, no official status within the education systems. Also, my position as non-Thai meant that I was not fully a part of the education system even when I worked in the context. Certainly it would be true to say, as will become evident in the discussion of the data, that the various interviewees spoke freely, and seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk in depth about their lives and careers and to be listened to with respect. I also observed informants’ in their classrooms whenever my interviews coincided with school terms. In such cases I spent 1–2 days with the informants, observing not only their regularly scheduled classes but their usual daily routines. No specific observational schedule was used as my intention was not to record, for example, precise patterns of teacher–student interaction or the amount of time spent on teacher talk or student talk but simply to record impressions of general teaching approaches and to note any features of the lessons which I found particularly interesting. The observations were not designed as the primary research instrument, but as a supplementary means of allowing an element of ‘methodological triangulation’ (Cohen et al., 2000) in the research, i.e. to provide another perspective on what informants had to say about their classroom teaching. Reference to this observational data will be made on occasion throughout the discussion of findings though
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there will be a principal emphasis on narrative reporting from the interview data in accordance with the overall purpose of the study to ‘give voice’ to the participating teachers. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, a time-consuming process which resulted in some 370 pages of printed paper, but a valuable process for developing in-depth familiarity with the content of the data. Once the interviews were transcribed, I worked with the printouts to refine initial, tentative interpretations made during transcription, examining each transcript individually at first and then scrutinizing interpretations across all transcripts. A process of ‘meaning categorization’ (Kvale, 1996) occurred as stretches of talk were attributed to thematic categories and sub-categories. The main dimensions of categories arose partly from relevant literature, partly from the interview topic areas and partly from the process of analysis itself, the latter being akin to that of induction in grounded theory – though I was not concerned with the gradual process of abstraction and moving towards theory so much as ‘‘look[ing] for ways to assemble the disparate data into a whole, without creating the whole forcibly” (Henning, 2000, p. 9). I saw my task as analyst as uncovering the meaning of the human experience of teaching contained within the narratives of the informants. Notes from classroom observations were examined and sections from these notes cross-linked to the thematic categories identified in the interviews. 3.2. Participants Of the seven teachers interviewed, six worked in the north-east of Thailand and one in the north. They have been anonymized here as: Arunee, Ladda, Naraporn, Orapan, Sasikarn, Sudarat (all female) and Suthee (male). All of the interviewees were known to me through my professional engagement in education in Thailand for more than 15 years, and 6 of them have been known to me for this entire period. I intentionally sought interviewees who had had extensive experience of education in their state system and who would thus be able to speak from the basis of a broad range of experience. None of the interviewees, then, were at the beginning of their careers and this fact has enabled the gathering of wide-ranging data across participants’ lives, from their own schooling to the mid- to later stages of their careers. I recognise that, had I chosen to interview beginning teachers, the responses of the interviewees to the topics raised and thus the findings of this study might have been very different. However, it must equally be recognised that, in research of this type, one set of interviewees is not privileged over any other and all are equally capable of making valuable though differing contributions to the knowledge base of the profession. The sample does not, as Cohen et al. (2000, p. 104) put it, ‘‘pretend to represent the wider population” of teachers in Thailand and so there can be no claims as to the generalisability of these findings. The only claim that can be made is that they illuminate the situation from the particular perspectives of these teachers. 3.3. Setting The contexts in which the teachers in this study began work – and in which five continue to work, with two having moved to the tertiary sector – are government secondary schools in north and north-east Thailand. Secondary level in the Thai system is called ‘Mathayom’, abbreviated as ‘M’ and there are six grade levels, M1–M6 (ages 12–17). Where there is more than one class at each level, these are numbered consecutively, e.g. M6/1, M6/2 and so on. Thai education is regarded as ‘traditional’ (here used to indicate a teacher-fronted, teacher-controlled approach) and authoritarian in nature (Chayanuvat, 2003) and there has been considerable public debate about such methods of teaching and testing now being inappropriate to modern Thai society (Bunnag, 2005). The authoritarianism manifests itself in the highly structured nature of schools themselves where school directors wield immense power over teachers which, again, is at odds with official pronouncements regarding the ‘empowerment’ of teachers. Although English is not a compulsory subject in the Thai curriculum, virtually all schools teach the language. Class sizes of 40–50 are the norm. Learner-centred methods are legislated for in the most recent National Education Act of B.E. 2542 (1999) for all subjects (Office of the National Education Commission, 1999, p. 35) and recent initiatives have re-emphasised ‘‘policies aimed at transforming the teaching and learning of languages to be more communicative” (Ministry of Education, 2006). In harmony with official pronouncements, schools use textbooks which purport to be ‘communicative’ in orientation: these textbooks are predominantly western imports.
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4. Findings and discussion In this article I have chosen to discuss two areas relating to these English teachers’ professional lives in Thailand, viz. (1) ‘Classroom practice’; and (2) ‘Commitment to teaching’. I have preferred to interrelate findings and discussion in relation to published literature, rather than to separate them, to provide what I hope will be a more coherent narrative of these Thai teachers in relation to the professional discourse. My intention is to provide ‘snapshots’ of the lives of Thai teachers in order to shed light on their situations. The constraints of a journal article inevitably limit what I am able to discuss and I have focused on these two areas as the data reveals that they are central to the life of an English teacher in Thailand. 4.1. Classroom practice Holliday notes that in terms of classroom practice the ‘traditional’ is no longer entirely the teacher-fronted, grammar-translation class of popular imagination but that ‘‘many . . . communicative practices have been established for a long time and have indeed become themselves traditional” (Holliday, 2005, p. 11). CLT could now be said to be the dominant paradigm in English teaching worldwide, at least in its theoretical representation in official curriculum documents. But the interpretation of official mandates is a different matter and classroom teaching, as we shall see, may reveal many different interpretations of ‘communicative practices’. Against this background, amongst all the informants interviewed there was high value placed upon the need to use English to communicate in the class and, generally, support expressed in principle for a communicative teaching approach. As one of the informants, Sudarat, said: ‘‘I try to find how can I encourage my students to speak more English.” In the case of the Thai informants as a group, however, there was no uniformity expressed of how the communicative approach was used in their own classes, or, indeed, whether it was used at all on a continuing basis. Sudarat made clear that she felt there was misunderstanding within the Thai teaching community about what CLT and the student-centred teaching at its basis meant. Her view of the prevailing understanding was that ‘‘many schools focus on the worksheets, you know, the worksheets and a lot of exercises. It means student-centred, that’s it now. I think they have misunderstood about this” (Sudarat). Other informants offered support in general terms for CLT but did not see it as the only determinant of classroom methods for Thai teachers, regardless of the official curriculum. For example, another teacher, Naraporn, indicated that in the last week of the school semester examination constraints meant that she could not use a communicative teaching approach, even though she valued it. The situation also required her to use students’ first language when explaining grammar points, a common practice in Thai schools. It’s very good and right now, here in my school, we have forty teachers altogether, and then we still have the communicative approach. [. . .] it’s good – communicative approach – it’s good. [. . .] This week, in this school, communicative teaching is until this week because next week we will have the final examination. We do this [communicative approach] along with traditional styles because I have to teach grammatical points to them. I have to talk abut present perfect, I have to talk about present or past continuous, things like that. We still have to talk about this. (Naraporn) She explicitly stated that ‘‘I don’t talk English when I talk about grammar, many more understand” (Naraporn), a practice which she related to the demands of the university entrance examination dominating practice in the higher grades. Other teachers also commented on examination demands (see below). In common with Naraporn, Ladda also provided support for the applicability of the communicative approach. However, she went on to acknowledge that in her own classrooms there was a need to adapt to situational realities and so use more Thai and even the local north-eastern dialect (which she referred to as Lao). Following a lesson observation class where I remarked on use of the first language she commented: Yeah, [I use] some Lao. I: Why do you do that? Because I have learnt from experience. Some students remember a lot and learn when we compare with the meaning of Lao; and some students don’t understand English. (Ladda)
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Most of the children in her school came from farming communities and saw little need for English either in their present or their future lives: ‘‘They don’t have a background in English and the context that encourages them to think that English is very important.” Ladda therefore used the students first language as an aid to their learning and, even when some did become more proficient in English, she continued to use the first language to show consideration for the students in other ways: ‘‘In some classes when they are very good, I start to use Thai or Lao just to make a joke when they are sleepy or they feel bored or something like that.” For Arunee the approach and the amount of English used depended on the class. Lesson observation notes for her M6/1 class recorded ‘‘Class predominantly in English. Some Thai during latter stages of grammar explanations” and for another class of the same grade, M6/7, ‘‘Much more Thai [than for M6/1] used to check vocab, confirm instructions. Most students clearly not understanding much [English] though some busy writing in their books”. In Arunee’s school, as in most schools in Thailand, classes were arranged according to ability (M6/1 being rated more highly than M6/7) and at M6 level it was the university entrance examination rather than the official curriculum that seemed to determine how children should be taught. When asked about the different approaches in the two lessons in the interview Arunee commented – ‘‘I need to guide them [Class M6/7]” – and noted that school requirements meant ‘‘We have to give them the same evaluation” so the classes had to cover the same material. She complained: ‘‘One of the obstacles that we are fighting, we are struggling now, is because we cannot do the child-centred activity for this level, especially M6, because of the entrance examination.” Clearly the use of particular methods may be constrained by contextual features over which teachers have no control, the washback effect of examination formats taking precedence over curriculum mandates being common (Weir, 1990). Sudarat consistently expressed her desire to use English in the class as much as possible; and was unfailingly observed to do so with her secondary school classes. Nevertheless she found difficulties implementing her approach when she moved institutions, contrasting her experience in school with that of her new role in Teachers’ College: With my students at [school] I could use English the whole period [. . .] I said [to the college students] I’m Thai but I like to speak English when I teach English, because in their schools they have never heard any English sounds from their English teachers. So I asked them . . . how did you study, how did your teachers teach you? They told me that they just follow the textbook and they have no chance to interact in English. (Sudarat) It would seem, then, from her college students’ reactions that Sudarat’s own teaching methods were not the norm in other Thai schools; and, indeed, we have seen that other Thai informants interviewed for this study sometimes adopted classroom practices which were at variance with the requirements of the national curriculum. However, the persistence of the older traditional, teacher-fronted, grammar-translation approaches should not always be thought of simply in deficit terms, i.e. as resulting from a lack of understanding or willingness of teachers to implement a communicative approach. Most teachers teach as they do because they believe that the methods adopted are effective for the purpose. The data indicates not only that informants were aware of the principles of a communicative approach and its place in the required curriculum but that the older approaches persist because some teachers find them useful and appropriate with certain groups of learners. This may be tied to the demands of examinations and the requirement to teach grammar in a formal way, or related to situational constraints in which teachers respond to students who have no background in English and feel the language has little or no relevance to their present or future lives. This ‘‘persistence of inherited traditions of teaching” (Pomson, 2002, p. 23) has been found in other contexts (see, e.g., Sato and Kleinsasser, 2004) and in Thailand Pomson’s conclusion would seem to be pertinent that inherited traditions persist because they are regarded as useful in their particular contexts of occurrence and that they continue ‘‘a not-yet-completed narrative” (Pomson, 2002, p. 24; citing MacIntyre, 1985, p. 221). The perceptions reported in the data indicate, then, that teachers use methods which they feel to be appropriate to the purpose of promoting children’s learning – and to enable them to pass key examinations – and that these may, on occasion, not be those specified in national curricula. Though teachers have little overt professional autonomy in relation to officially mandated curricula, they retain de facto independence over the degree to which an official curriculum is actually implemented in the classroom.
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In spite of constraints, Thai teachers – as one would expect – also demonstrated creativity in their teaching. To cite just one example, Sasikarn, teaching in a resource-poor secondary school, reported how she took her students out of the class to practise. Like giving directions, I took them outside and they work like a team, teamwork, like one blindfolds their eyes and the other one gives the directions. Like they have to go straight on and turn right and turn left; and then which pair reaches the finishing line first without hitting the – you know I use the thread to tie up from one tree to another tree and then they can walk along there – the pair that reaches the finishing line without hitting the thread that I tie up so they were the winners. They enjoy it. I took them outside and did a lot of activities. (Sasikarn) These were not necessarily activities that she had learnt on any teacher-training course as she noted ‘‘that kind of activity, outdoors activity, I got it from the scout camp. I just adapt into English” (Sasikarn). She thus showed that an imaginative teacher can overcome the constraints of a resource-poor school and make use of the everyday environment in creative ways to promote students’ learning. Classroom teaching and the methods that these teachers used are, then, many, varied and frequently imaginative. What unites them all is that selection of methods is based on an understanding of the needs of the students in their particular situations. Some of the teachers combined the curriculum requirement of a communicative approach with older traditional methods – grammar translation – when circumstances required it; while others based their practice on communicative methods alone. However, the basic principle in the selection of methods as revealed in the data is always to meet the needs of the students at the particular stage of their school career, and sometimes it is examination needs which predominate. 4.2. Commitment to teaching There is ample evidence in the interviews that these particular teachers had a strong belief in and commitment to the value of their work; its value to students in their schools and to society at large. These are aspects of what Lortie (1984) called the ‘psychic rewards’ of teaching which are central to teacher commitment and which often serve as a counterbalance to the negative factors surrounding teaching summarised by Do¨rnyei (2001, p. 174–175) such as: high stress levels; increasing restrictions on teacher autonomy; difficulties of maintaining intellectual challenge in the face of curriculum and classroom routinization; and poor economic rewards compared to other professions. The commitment of these teachers came from outside as well as from within the individual. Sudarat, for example, drew strength from her family: ‘‘My family helped me a lot, especially my mother.” But she derived her primary commitment from a desire to help her students to realise their potential and from wanting to help improve English teaching in Thailand. A strong sense of duty and integrity comes across in these comments: When I taught at [previous] school I wanted to make my students enter university, as many students as possible. . . . [Now] I plan to help my students and I plan to help Thailand in terms of teachers of English. I would like to see English teachers improve in their careers more than this. I would like to see good models of teachers and I would like to see Thai students speak English more fluently than nowadays. (Sudarat) In common with teachers in many other countries, hard work was sometimes motivated by economic necessity as well as being a quality of the individual. Naraporn’s working commitments, in addition to her duties at school, encompassed part-time weekend teaching at the local Teachers’ College and private tuition after school hours. She was also writing a series of textbooks and studying part-time for a PhD in educational administration at a local university. Her only free time was one Sunday every two weeks when she got up ‘‘late in the morning about six o’clock, normally I start at five” (Naraporn) and spent time with her family. She felt strongly that her contented home life – ‘‘My husband is just like my close friend. And my three boys, we feel very close” (Naraporn) – enabled her to do more than others could do. But her willingness to work long hours on her textbooks was also motivated by a desire to show what it was possible for Thai teachers to achieve: The main thing, I would like to present my ideas to the world, to show everyone that Thai teachers, Thai local teachers can do this kind of thing. I would like to show them that. (Naraporn)
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Commitment to their work was also manifested in the everyday, local actions that these teachers took with their school students. From observation it was clear that Sasikarn was a skilled classroom practitioner with the ability to empathise with her students and develop in them a desire to learn. She recalled the situation when she moved to her second school and had (as is common with teachers new to a school) been given an M6 class considered by other teachers to contain a large number of ‘naughty’ boys. The naughtiness was restricted to many of the students skipping class regularly but this was potentially damaging to them as 80% attendance was required in order for students to pass the course and so graduate from school. Rather than leave the students to their own devices Sasikarn made the effort to persuade them back to class. So I just try to look for them and then, you know, talk to them – not like in other teachers’ ways but in my way. I gave them the good reasons to come to the class and what will happen if they skip the class [. . .] but if they come back and start the lesson they have a chance to pass. (Sasikarn) When asked if they did return she said: Yeah, they did. [. . .] I was happy about these students and then they remembered me after they graduated from the school. They came back and they said ‘‘Thank you very much, Ajarn [Thai for ‘teacher’]. At least I know something, I learnt something from you.” That’s the good thing. (Sasikarn) Sasikarn has always gained immense satisfaction from doing her job well in the classroom, and, as we can see from her reactions above, she embodies a ‘culture of care’ (Nias, 1999) in the classroom. This care extends from her concern for the social as well as academic welfare of her students to the amount of effort she puts into her own lesson preparation to provide her students with fulfilling classroom experiences. When asked if she enjoyed being a teacher she said: Yes, especially teaching in the classroom. And especially when I, you know, work to prepare for the lesson and the students interact in the class, that’s the best. But if I don’t have time to prepare, I just use my experience and talk to the students in the classroom without materials or without techniques, it’s very boring. (Sasikarn) Here she notes that for her the time to plan lessons is important and thus lack of time to plan properly impacts on the quality of the classroom experience for both her students and herself. Lack of planning time is directly related to the other duties teaches in Thai schools are required to perform. It is expected that all Thai teachers will undertake administrative duties beyond their usual teaching loads of some 20–24 fifty-minute periods a week. Naraporn worked in the academic administrative section in her school; Ladda worked with her school’s research section, overseeing projects to implement educational reform; while Arunee, Sasikarn, Sudarat and Suthee all worked (or had worked) in the national in-service training network of English Resource and Instruction Centres (ERICs), responsible for developing and running courses for teachers in their provinces; and Naraporn, Sasikarn and Suthee had also been required to act as master of ceremonies at formal school events. Arunee and Sasikarn had twice been and Arunee continued to be head of the English department in their schools. These administrative duties, which Ladda reported in schools to vary from such things as working in ‘‘the school canteen, about testing food” to overseeing ‘‘the discipline of the students” place considerable demands on the time of all teachers. Similar experience of teacher overload has been reflected elsewhere (for examples from other countries see e.g. Helsby, 2000; Klette, 2000; Munthe, 2003; RobertsHolmes, 2003) and is part of what seems to be a general trend towards the ‘intensification of teachers’ work’ (Hargreaves, 1994) which, as we have noted from Do¨rnyei (2001), is a significant counterweight to the positive, psychic rewards of teaching. However, enjoyment in the interaction with students, in helping them to learn, remains a major source of satisfaction for teachers, whatever their situation. As Estola et al. (2003, p. 239) found: ‘‘Vocation is ultimately adopted in practice and it shapes practice.” Certainly, enjoyment in teaching was a universal theme amongst the informants here – ‘‘I always enjoy teaching, no matter where” as Suthee said – and the desire to teach well a strong motivating force – ‘‘The thing that stimulates me is I just would like to be a good teacher” as Ladda said. Teachers here also recognise that their impact on students can extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom, as we have seen from how Sasikarn was concerned that her ‘naughty’ students did not harm their prospects of graduation from school. Sasikarn makes clear that in the final analysis dedication
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to work is a personal responsibility. She works ‘‘because I would like to do it. I enjoy doing it. It’s my job. Whenever I was assigned to do something, I’ll do my best”. Some teachers will always give everything they can to their work, while others will not. Some are always striving to improve themselves so that they can do their jobs better while others are not. In this respect teaching is no different to any other profession. All the Thai informants seemed to share a desire for self-improvement, taking higher degrees where possible and taking advantage of in-service training opportunities. Sasikarn, for example, stated that she went to take a diploma and then MA in TEFL as well as going to America for a year on a teacher exchange programme because ‘‘My knowledge is just this bit, only tiny bit” and ‘‘My English is not good enough, yes. My duty comes first, my English is not good enough”. From the discussion it seems to be clear that if we consider what makes an effective, successful teacher we have to go far beyond the boundaries of the technical aspects of teaching – the methods used in the classroom. Methods are important but they are just one aspect of a teacher’s effectiveness. Other characteristics are equally important and we can turn to the perspectives of one of the Thai teachers for an overview. Suthee gave a number of key qualities for success in teaching – hard work, devotion, sincerity, honesty, trust, helpfulness and friendliness. Suthee did not consider methods to be so important if these were visualized as uncritical adherence to one method – ‘‘We can’t strictly follow one particular method” – but more important was a principled selection of methods based on the students’ background, situation and needs which took full account of the humanity of the individual. As he said: When I teach I teach the students and I teach the subject matter. I teach the human being as well. I see him as a human being and also I give, I provide knowledge. The value of using a variety of methods was also recognised by Sudarat. In her advice to other teachers, she declared it was important to be open to ideas from whatever source and that any technique had potential usefulness in Thailand if adapted: Don’t be ‘anti’ any techniques – ‘Oh, this is not good for Thai people’ – you can adapt any teaching approach, any teaching techniques to use with your students. 5. Conclusion The teachers’ perspectives discussed here contribute, I feel, to a vision of ELT classroom practice as a response to the locally-situated needs of the participants (Butler, 2005; Canagarajah, 2005; Mangubhai et al., 2005) and suggest that the ELT profession needs to acknowledge a richer and more varied picture of classroom life than one sanctioned by official curricula; one in which there is an acceptance that ‘traditional’ forms of instruction persist for a reason, and that to uncover the reason there is a need to investigate the sociocultural and educational contexts of use of the methods. This is corroborated by Hu’s (2005) finding that the use of particular methods by groups of teachers in China correlated with particular socio-economic and cultural conditions, encompassing disparities in the availability of subject resources, school facilities, the quality of the teaching force vis-a`-vis government minimum professional requirements, access to authentic language outside the class and differing views on the value of English in terms of economic and social capital. The research here argues that investigation of socio-cultural and educational contexts in which classroom teaching is enacted is crucial to the understanding of local practices. This understanding will, in turn, contribute to correcting a monolithic view of ELT based on western conceptions of idealised practice. More research of this kind is, in consequence, needed to enrich our collective understanding of the global practices of ELT in its many and varied local contexts. Further, our professional discourse of ELT as a global profession masks the reality that for many NNESTs – unlike highly mobile NS teachers – their primary professional identity is as career teachers within their own societies, with the wider social responsibilities that such an identity entails. These social responsibilities are strongly represented in the commitment of the teachers here to their work as teachers of English in the Thai education system and they demonstrate situational teaching competence. Teachers’ ‘nativeness’ in this respect needs to be given its due prominence in understandings of teaching and learning English as a foreign language in context, rather than disproportionate attention paid to ‘nonnativeness’ in terms of English language competence.
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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Thai teachers who gave so freely of their time to provide the data on which this article is based. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which have helped to strengthen the article immensely. Any remaining flaws are, of course, my own. Appendix A. Interview topic areas Reasons for becoming a teacher Family background Present post – How long here – Classes taught – Thoughts about teaching – Enjoyment – Motivation – Dislikes – School administration – Induction – Staff–student relationships Own schooling Pre-service training In-service training Other formal qualifications Other posts Teachers and society English – Its position in the country – Attitudes to English
References ´ rva, P., Medgyes, P., 2000. Native and non-native teachers in the classroom. System 28, 355–372. A Berns, M., Barrett, J., Chan, C., Chikuma, Y., Friedrich, P., Hadjidimos, O.-M., Harney, J., Hislope, K., Johnson, D., Kimball, S., Low, Y., McHenry, T., Palaiologos, V., Petray, M., Shapiro, R., Ramirez Shook, A., 1999. Hegemonic discourse revisited. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 9 (1), 138–141. Bolton, K., 2004. World Englishes. In: Davies, A., Elder, C. (Eds.), The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford, pp. 367–396. Braine, G. (Ed.), 1999. Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Braine, G. (Ed.), 2005. Teaching English to the World: History, Curriculum and Practice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Bunnag, S., 2005. Education reform is one for the books. In: Bangkok Post, 25 February, 2005. Post Publishing Company, Bangkok. Butler, Y.G., 2005. Comparative perspectives towards communicative activities among elementary school teachers in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Language Teaching Research 9 (4), 423–446. Canagarajah, A.S., 1999a. Interrogating the native speaker fallacy. In: Braine, G. (Ed.), Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 77–92. Canagarajah, A.S., 1999b. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Canagarajah, A.S. (Ed.), 2005. Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Chayanuvat, A., 2003. English learning experiences of Thai students enrolled at a university: a case study. In: Hull, J., Harris, J., Darasawang, P. (Eds.), Research in ELT. Proceedings of the International Conference 9–11 April 2003. School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thonburi, Thailand. Chirban, J., 1996. Interviewing in Depth: The Interactive-Relational Approach. Sage Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA. Cohen, L., Manion, L., Morrison, K., 2000. Research Methods in Education, fifth ed. RoutledgeFalmer, London. Do¨rnyei, Z., 2001. Teaching and Researching Motivation. Longman, Harlow.
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Estola, E., Erkkila¨, E., Syrja¨la¨, L., 2003. A moral voice of vocation in teachers’ narratives. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 9 (3), 239–256. Goodson, I.F., Sikes, P., 2001. Life History Research in Educational Settings: Learning from Lives. Open University Press, Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA. Hargreaves, A., 1994. Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Cassell, London. Harmer, J., 2003. Popular culture, methods and context. ELT Journal 57 (3), 288–294. Helsby, G., 2000. Multiple truths and contested realities: the changing faces of teacher professionalism in England. In: Day, C., Fernadez, A., Hauge, T.E., Møller, J. (Eds.), The Life and Work of Teachers: International Perspectives in Changing Times. Falmer Press, London and New York, pp. 93–108. Henning, E., 2000. Walking with ‘‘barefoot” teachers: an ethnographically fashioned casebook. Teaching and Teacher Education 16, 3–20. Holliday, A., 2005. The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hu, G., 2005. Contextual influences on instructional practices: a Chinese case for an ecological approach to ELT. TESOL Quarterly 39 (4), 635–660. Inbar-Lurie, O., 2005. Mind the gap: self and perceived native-speaker identities of EFL teachers. In: Llurda, E. (Ed.), Non-Native Language Teachers: Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession. Springer, New York, pp. 265–281. Klette, K., 2000. Working-time blues: how Norwegian teachers experience restructuring in education. In: Day, C., Fernadez, A., Hauge, T.E., Møller, J. (Eds.), The Life and Work of Teachers: International Perspectives in Changing Times. Falmer Press, London and New York, pp. 146–158. Kvale, S., 1996. InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Lortie, D., 1984. Teacher career and work rewards. In: Hargreaves, A., Woods, P. (Eds.), Classrooms and Staffrooms: The Sociology of Teachers and Teaching. Open University Press, Buckingham, pp. 174–189. MacIntyre, A., 1985. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Duckworth, London. Mangubhai, F., Marland, P., Dashwood, A., Son, J.-B., 2005. Similarities and differences in teachers’ conceptions of communicative language teaching: does the use of an educational model cast a better light? Language Teaching Research 9 (1), 31–66. Medgyes, P., 1999. The Non-Native Teacher, second ed. Hueber, Ismaning. Medgyes, P., 2000. Non-native speaker teacher. In: Byram, M. (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 444–446. Ministry of Education, 2006. The Education System in Thailand. Ministry of Education, Bangkok, Thailand. Mitchell, R., Lee, J.H.-W., 2003. Sameness and difference in classroom learning cultures: interpretations of communicative pedagogy in the UK and Korea. Language Teaching Research 7 (1), 35–63. Munthe, E., 2003. Teachers’ workplace and professional certainty. Teaching and Teacher Education 19, 801–813. Nias, J., 1999. Teaching as a culture of care. In: Prosser, J. (Ed.), School Culture. Paul Chapman, London, pp. 66–81. Office of the National Education Commission, 1999. National Education Act of B.E. 2542. Office of the National Education Commission, Bangkok, Thailand. Pacek, D., 2005. ‘Personality not nationality’: Foreign students’ perceptions of a non-native speaker lecturer of English at a British university. In: Llurda, E. (Ed.), Non-Native Language Teachers: Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 243–262. Pomson, A., 2002. The rebbe reworked: an inquiry into the persistence of inherited traditions of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education 18, 23–34. Rampton, M.B.H., 1990. Displacing the ‘native speaker’: expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. ELT Journal 44 (2), 97–101. Roberts-Holmes, G., 2003. Towards an understanding of Gambian teachers’ complex professionalism. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 9 (1), 35–45. Rubin, H.J., Rubin, I.S., 2005. Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data, second ed. Sage Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA. Sato, K., Kleinsasser, R.C., 2004. Beliefs, practices and interactions of teachers in a Japanese high school English department. Teaching and Teacher Education 20, 797–816. Schutt, R.K., 1999. Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research, second ed. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Shin, J., Kellogg, D., 2007. The novice, the native and the nature of language teacher expertise. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 17 (2), 159–177. Snape, D., Spencer, L., 2003. The foundations of qualitative research. In: Ritchie, J., Lewis, J. (Eds.), Qualitative Research Practice. A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers. Sage Publications Ltd., London, pp. 1–23. Tsui, A.M., 2003. Understanding Expertise in Teaching: Case Studies of ESL Teachers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tudor, I., 2001. The Dynamics of the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Weir, C., 1990. Communicative Language Testing. Prentice Hall International, Hemel Hempstead.
System 37 (2009) 1–11 www.elsevier.com/locate/system
Non-native English-speaking teachers, context and English language teaching David Hayes * Department of Applied Linguistics, Brock University, St Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada Received 17 August 2007; received in revised form 27 May 2008; accepted 9 June 2008
Abstract This article contends that, in spite of a recent upsurge in writing on non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in the global discourse of English language teaching (ELT), the experiences of NNESTSs working within their own state educational systems remain seriously under-investigated. To help to redress this, the article explores, from their own perspectives, how a group of NNESTs experience English teaching in Thailand, where English is taught as a foreign language. Though the article only has space to consider two aspects of the teachers’ lives and careers – classroom methods and commitment to teaching – it is hoped that it will contribute to an understanding of the many and varied locally-based practices of ELT, as well as helping to correct a monolithic view of ELT based on western conceptions of practice. The importance of NNESTs of English being ‘native’ in terms of their situational teaching competence is, accordingly, given due weight. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs); Teaching behaviour; Teacher professionalism
1. Introduction It remains a measure of the condition of the field of ELT1 that ‘‘expertise is defined and dominated by native speakers” (Canagarajah, 1999a, p. 85; see also Holliday, 2005), and that, as a consequence – though the situation is changing – the experiences and perceptions of non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs)2 feature disproportionately little in the professional academic discourse despite their overwhelming numerical majority. This article contends that there is a need to bring the experiences of
*
Tel.: +1 (905) 688 5550x5359. E-mail address: [email protected] 1 I have chosen to use the term ELT (English language teaching) as a convenient acronym for what is a complex scenario where English is taught variously as a second, subsequent or foreign language. 2 I recognise that ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ are linguistically and conceptually problematic terms (see, e.g. Rampton, 1990). However, as they are still common in the worldwide discourse of ELT, I shall use them here for lack of generally accepted alternatives. 0346-251X/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.system.2008.06.001
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NNESTs working within their own state educational systems to the forefront of the ELT professional discourse in order to redress significant imbalances in our knowledge base. To do so is important because, to adapt a comment from Berns et al. (1999, p. 138), ‘‘what is of concern is the value and necessity of hearing actual voices and views from the periphery that provide rich perspectives on and insights into the complexity of English [language teaching] worldwide.” This then has the potential to inform discussions about an ‘‘ecological perspective” on language teaching in which ‘‘understanding the reality of teaching involves exploring the meaning it has for students, for teachers, and for the others who, in one way or another, influence what is done in classrooms” (Tudor, 2001, p. 9). The ‘reality of teaching’ will, of course, vary from context to context. Accordingly, in this article I shall explore aspects of the realities of English teaching in one country where English is a foreign language – Thailand – as experienced by NNESTs themselves. In doing this I shall rely primarily on the perspectives of the teachers themselves, expressed in their own words, gathered through in-depth interviewing. To uncover the experiences of NNESTs in context is important, not least because, as Harmer (2003, p. 338) says ‘‘the social context in which learning takes place is of vital importance to the success of the educational endeavour”. Thai teachers of English are teachers in the Thai state educational system first and foremost: they are government officials with permanent, pensionable positions. It is this social context which centres their lives as teachers and impacts upon their classroom decision-making. Thai teachers in the Thai educational system may be ‘non-native’ speakers of the language they teach, but they are ‘native’ in terms of their situational teaching competence – which is as much a part of their professional expertise as language competence (Shin and Kellogg, 2007). 2. NNESTs and ELT The scale of NNEST populations worldwide is immense. For example, Bolton (2004, p. 388) has calculated that in China alone the number of secondary school teachers of English totals some 500,000. In the much smaller country discussed in this article, Thailand, there are 63,450 teachers teaching English to some 9.6 million schoolchildren3. What is it that they do every day in their classrooms? How do they teach? What do they think about teaching and about being teachers? These dimensions of NNEST in countries such as Thailand are rarely explored. There have, however, been some important investigations of the experiences of NNESTs. Comparisons have been made between NNESTs and NESTs to uncover differences in aspects of teaching behaviour (see ´ rva and Medgyes, 2000; Medgyes, 1999; Shin and Kellogg, 2007). There have also been investigations e.g. A of instructional practices in particular contexts with a specific focus on representations of communicative language teaching (CLT) approaches. Hu (2005), for example, gathered data from Chinese students on their teachers’ classroom practices while Mitchell and Lee (2003) contrasted French language teaching in the UK with EFL teaching in Korea. Another notable study (Tsui, 2003) documented the development of expertise amongst a group of NNESTs in Hong Kong. The overtly ideological nature of ELT and its instantiation in a periphery community are the subject of Canagarajah (1999b). NNESTs have also reflected on their experiences as teachers within the educational systems of English-speaking countries (see e.g. Pacek, 2005, and the various papers in Braine, 1999); reported on perceived identities as native/non-native teachers (Inbar-Lurie, 2005); and, in one notable collection, set personal biographies as NNESTs alongside accounts of the history of ELT in their countries (Braine, 2005). However, these works aside, the active agency of NNESTs as teachers within their own educational systems is insufficiently explored when we consider the numbers of teachers involved. We still know comparatively little about the careers and classroom lives of teachers of English in countries such as Thailand from their own perspectives; and it seems valid to echo Medgyes’ (2000, p. 445) conclusion that ‘‘On the whole, the study of the non-native teacher remains a largely unexplored area in language education”. 3 I am grateful to Ajarn Laddawan Songka, Ministry of Education, Bangkok, for providing these figures. The number of teachers includes class teachers at the primary level who teach English amongst other subjects, as well as specialist English teachers usually teaching at secondary level.
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3. The research approach 3.1. Methodology Data for this article was gathered through in-depth, unstructured interviews with seven Thai teachers of English, each interview lasting between 2 and 3½ hours. Interviews were conducted in English though informants occasionally used Thai where they felt it necessary to convey a concept or a particular piece of information for which they could not think of the English equivalent. The interviews had a broad focus on the informants’ educational experiences as learners and teachers within their social contexts and a list of topic areas was used as a framework for discussion (see Appendix). The list did not, however, constrain the discussion and throughout the interviews I remained open to any topic informants wished to raise. As can be seen from the list, the interviews were wide ranging and it would not be possible to examine the entire range of topics in an article of this length. The over-arching research question was: What is the subjective experience of these informants in the state education system in Thailand with respect to their experiences as teachers within their own context throughout their careers? In this particular article I wish to focus on the following sub-set of research questions. (1) What are informants’ subjective perceptions of their classroom lives: what influences and shapes their classroom practice? (2) What are the sources of the informants’ commitment to teaching? The unstructured interviews aimed to provide answers to the research questions by opening a window of understanding onto how these teachers made sense of the social world of teaching which they inhabited (Snape and Spencer, 2003). Within this framework, the conduct of the interview itself was of paramount importance and all writers on interviewing as a research technique (see e.g. Chirban, 1996; Kvale, 1996; Rubin and Rubin, 2005) agree that interviewing of this type should strive to be ‘‘more like a conversation between partners than between a researcher and a subject” (Schutt, 1999, p. 304). But when there is inevitably a power imbalance in most interview situations, the undertones of researcher and researched roles resonating throughout the process, achieving this conversationality is a skilled process which requires practice. Interviews for this study were only conducted after I had known the participants for some time; with five of the seven participants being long-standing professional colleagues dating back to my first involvement in the Thai educational system more than fifteen years ago. This familiarity with context and with the research participants had both advantages and disadvantages: advantages in that I, as researcher, shared a great deal of contextual knowledge and could be seen as an empathetic rather than a detached outsider; disadvantages in that the prior relationship might have influenced what informants chose to reveal, what Goodson and Sikes (2001, p. 25) have termed a danger of ‘working in one’s own backyard’. In response I should note that my full-time involvement in the context had ceased by the time these interviews were made and that I had, therefore, no official status within the education systems. Also, my position as non-Thai meant that I was not fully a part of the education system even when I worked in the context. Certainly it would be true to say, as will become evident in the discussion of the data, that the various interviewees spoke freely, and seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk in depth about their lives and careers and to be listened to with respect. I also observed informants’ in their classrooms whenever my interviews coincided with school terms. In such cases I spent 1–2 days with the informants, observing not only their regularly scheduled classes but their usual daily routines. No specific observational schedule was used as my intention was not to record, for example, precise patterns of teacher–student interaction or the amount of time spent on teacher talk or student talk but simply to record impressions of general teaching approaches and to note any features of the lessons which I found particularly interesting. The observations were not designed as the primary research instrument, but as a supplementary means of allowing an element of ‘methodological triangulation’ (Cohen et al., 2000) in the research, i.e. to provide another perspective on what informants had to say about their classroom teaching. Reference to this observational data will be made on occasion throughout the discussion of findings though
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there will be a principal emphasis on narrative reporting from the interview data in accordance with the overall purpose of the study to ‘give voice’ to the participating teachers. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, a time-consuming process which resulted in some 370 pages of printed paper, but a valuable process for developing in-depth familiarity with the content of the data. Once the interviews were transcribed, I worked with the printouts to refine initial, tentative interpretations made during transcription, examining each transcript individually at first and then scrutinizing interpretations across all transcripts. A process of ‘meaning categorization’ (Kvale, 1996) occurred as stretches of talk were attributed to thematic categories and sub-categories. The main dimensions of categories arose partly from relevant literature, partly from the interview topic areas and partly from the process of analysis itself, the latter being akin to that of induction in grounded theory – though I was not concerned with the gradual process of abstraction and moving towards theory so much as ‘‘look[ing] for ways to assemble the disparate data into a whole, without creating the whole forcibly” (Henning, 2000, p. 9). I saw my task as analyst as uncovering the meaning of the human experience of teaching contained within the narratives of the informants. Notes from classroom observations were examined and sections from these notes cross-linked to the thematic categories identified in the interviews. 3.2. Participants Of the seven teachers interviewed, six worked in the north-east of Thailand and one in the north. They have been anonymized here as: Arunee, Ladda, Naraporn, Orapan, Sasikarn, Sudarat (all female) and Suthee (male). All of the interviewees were known to me through my professional engagement in education in Thailand for more than 15 years, and 6 of them have been known to me for this entire period. I intentionally sought interviewees who had had extensive experience of education in their state system and who would thus be able to speak from the basis of a broad range of experience. None of the interviewees, then, were at the beginning of their careers and this fact has enabled the gathering of wide-ranging data across participants’ lives, from their own schooling to the mid- to later stages of their careers. I recognise that, had I chosen to interview beginning teachers, the responses of the interviewees to the topics raised and thus the findings of this study might have been very different. However, it must equally be recognised that, in research of this type, one set of interviewees is not privileged over any other and all are equally capable of making valuable though differing contributions to the knowledge base of the profession. The sample does not, as Cohen et al. (2000, p. 104) put it, ‘‘pretend to represent the wider population” of teachers in Thailand and so there can be no claims as to the generalisability of these findings. The only claim that can be made is that they illuminate the situation from the particular perspectives of these teachers. 3.3. Setting The contexts in which the teachers in this study began work – and in which five continue to work, with two having moved to the tertiary sector – are government secondary schools in north and north-east Thailand. Secondary level in the Thai system is called ‘Mathayom’, abbreviated as ‘M’ and there are six grade levels, M1–M6 (ages 12–17). Where there is more than one class at each level, these are numbered consecutively, e.g. M6/1, M6/2 and so on. Thai education is regarded as ‘traditional’ (here used to indicate a teacher-fronted, teacher-controlled approach) and authoritarian in nature (Chayanuvat, 2003) and there has been considerable public debate about such methods of teaching and testing now being inappropriate to modern Thai society (Bunnag, 2005). The authoritarianism manifests itself in the highly structured nature of schools themselves where school directors wield immense power over teachers which, again, is at odds with official pronouncements regarding the ‘empowerment’ of teachers. Although English is not a compulsory subject in the Thai curriculum, virtually all schools teach the language. Class sizes of 40–50 are the norm. Learner-centred methods are legislated for in the most recent National Education Act of B.E. 2542 (1999) for all subjects (Office of the National Education Commission, 1999, p. 35) and recent initiatives have re-emphasised ‘‘policies aimed at transforming the teaching and learning of languages to be more communicative” (Ministry of Education, 2006). In harmony with official pronouncements, schools use textbooks which purport to be ‘communicative’ in orientation: these textbooks are predominantly western imports.
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4. Findings and discussion In this article I have chosen to discuss two areas relating to these English teachers’ professional lives in Thailand, viz. (1) ‘Classroom practice’; and (2) ‘Commitment to teaching’. I have preferred to interrelate findings and discussion in relation to published literature, rather than to separate them, to provide what I hope will be a more coherent narrative of these Thai teachers in relation to the professional discourse. My intention is to provide ‘snapshots’ of the lives of Thai teachers in order to shed light on their situations. The constraints of a journal article inevitably limit what I am able to discuss and I have focused on these two areas as the data reveals that they are central to the life of an English teacher in Thailand. 4.1. Classroom practice Holliday notes that in terms of classroom practice the ‘traditional’ is no longer entirely the teacher-fronted, grammar-translation class of popular imagination but that ‘‘many . . . communicative practices have been established for a long time and have indeed become themselves traditional” (Holliday, 2005, p. 11). CLT could now be said to be the dominant paradigm in English teaching worldwide, at least in its theoretical representation in official curriculum documents. But the interpretation of official mandates is a different matter and classroom teaching, as we shall see, may reveal many different interpretations of ‘communicative practices’. Against this background, amongst all the informants interviewed there was high value placed upon the need to use English to communicate in the class and, generally, support expressed in principle for a communicative teaching approach. As one of the informants, Sudarat, said: ‘‘I try to find how can I encourage my students to speak more English.” In the case of the Thai informants as a group, however, there was no uniformity expressed of how the communicative approach was used in their own classes, or, indeed, whether it was used at all on a continuing basis. Sudarat made clear that she felt there was misunderstanding within the Thai teaching community about what CLT and the student-centred teaching at its basis meant. Her view of the prevailing understanding was that ‘‘many schools focus on the worksheets, you know, the worksheets and a lot of exercises. It means student-centred, that’s it now. I think they have misunderstood about this” (Sudarat). Other informants offered support in general terms for CLT but did not see it as the only determinant of classroom methods for Thai teachers, regardless of the official curriculum. For example, another teacher, Naraporn, indicated that in the last week of the school semester examination constraints meant that she could not use a communicative teaching approach, even though she valued it. The situation also required her to use students’ first language when explaining grammar points, a common practice in Thai schools. It’s very good and right now, here in my school, we have forty teachers altogether, and then we still have the communicative approach. [. . .] it’s good – communicative approach – it’s good. [. . .] This week, in this school, communicative teaching is until this week because next week we will have the final examination. We do this [communicative approach] along with traditional styles because I have to teach grammatical points to them. I have to talk abut present perfect, I have to talk about present or past continuous, things like that. We still have to talk about this. (Naraporn) She explicitly stated that ‘‘I don’t talk English when I talk about grammar, many more understand” (Naraporn), a practice which she related to the demands of the university entrance examination dominating practice in the higher grades. Other teachers also commented on examination demands (see below). In common with Naraporn, Ladda also provided support for the applicability of the communicative approach. However, she went on to acknowledge that in her own classrooms there was a need to adapt to situational realities and so use more Thai and even the local north-eastern dialect (which she referred to as Lao). Following a lesson observation class where I remarked on use of the first language she commented: Yeah, [I use] some Lao. I: Why do you do that? Because I have learnt from experience. Some students remember a lot and learn when we compare with the meaning of Lao; and some students don’t understand English. (Ladda)
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Most of the children in her school came from farming communities and saw little need for English either in their present or their future lives: ‘‘They don’t have a background in English and the context that encourages them to think that English is very important.” Ladda therefore used the students first language as an aid to their learning and, even when some did become more proficient in English, she continued to use the first language to show consideration for the students in other ways: ‘‘In some classes when they are very good, I start to use Thai or Lao just to make a joke when they are sleepy or they feel bored or something like that.” For Arunee the approach and the amount of English used depended on the class. Lesson observation notes for her M6/1 class recorded ‘‘Class predominantly in English. Some Thai during latter stages of grammar explanations” and for another class of the same grade, M6/7, ‘‘Much more Thai [than for M6/1] used to check vocab, confirm instructions. Most students clearly not understanding much [English] though some busy writing in their books”. In Arunee’s school, as in most schools in Thailand, classes were arranged according to ability (M6/1 being rated more highly than M6/7) and at M6 level it was the university entrance examination rather than the official curriculum that seemed to determine how children should be taught. When asked about the different approaches in the two lessons in the interview Arunee commented – ‘‘I need to guide them [Class M6/7]” – and noted that school requirements meant ‘‘We have to give them the same evaluation” so the classes had to cover the same material. She complained: ‘‘One of the obstacles that we are fighting, we are struggling now, is because we cannot do the child-centred activity for this level, especially M6, because of the entrance examination.” Clearly the use of particular methods may be constrained by contextual features over which teachers have no control, the washback effect of examination formats taking precedence over curriculum mandates being common (Weir, 1990). Sudarat consistently expressed her desire to use English in the class as much as possible; and was unfailingly observed to do so with her secondary school classes. Nevertheless she found difficulties implementing her approach when she moved institutions, contrasting her experience in school with that of her new role in Teachers’ College: With my students at [school] I could use English the whole period [. . .] I said [to the college students] I’m Thai but I like to speak English when I teach English, because in their schools they have never heard any English sounds from their English teachers. So I asked them . . . how did you study, how did your teachers teach you? They told me that they just follow the textbook and they have no chance to interact in English. (Sudarat) It would seem, then, from her college students’ reactions that Sudarat’s own teaching methods were not the norm in other Thai schools; and, indeed, we have seen that other Thai informants interviewed for this study sometimes adopted classroom practices which were at variance with the requirements of the national curriculum. However, the persistence of the older traditional, teacher-fronted, grammar-translation approaches should not always be thought of simply in deficit terms, i.e. as resulting from a lack of understanding or willingness of teachers to implement a communicative approach. Most teachers teach as they do because they believe that the methods adopted are effective for the purpose. The data indicates not only that informants were aware of the principles of a communicative approach and its place in the required curriculum but that the older approaches persist because some teachers find them useful and appropriate with certain groups of learners. This may be tied to the demands of examinations and the requirement to teach grammar in a formal way, or related to situational constraints in which teachers respond to students who have no background in English and feel the language has little or no relevance to their present or future lives. This ‘‘persistence of inherited traditions of teaching” (Pomson, 2002, p. 23) has been found in other contexts (see, e.g., Sato and Kleinsasser, 2004) and in Thailand Pomson’s conclusion would seem to be pertinent that inherited traditions persist because they are regarded as useful in their particular contexts of occurrence and that they continue ‘‘a not-yet-completed narrative” (Pomson, 2002, p. 24; citing MacIntyre, 1985, p. 221). The perceptions reported in the data indicate, then, that teachers use methods which they feel to be appropriate to the purpose of promoting children’s learning – and to enable them to pass key examinations – and that these may, on occasion, not be those specified in national curricula. Though teachers have little overt professional autonomy in relation to officially mandated curricula, they retain de facto independence over the degree to which an official curriculum is actually implemented in the classroom.
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In spite of constraints, Thai teachers – as one would expect – also demonstrated creativity in their teaching. To cite just one example, Sasikarn, teaching in a resource-poor secondary school, reported how she took her students out of the class to practise. Like giving directions, I took them outside and they work like a team, teamwork, like one blindfolds their eyes and the other one gives the directions. Like they have to go straight on and turn right and turn left; and then which pair reaches the finishing line first without hitting the – you know I use the thread to tie up from one tree to another tree and then they can walk along there – the pair that reaches the finishing line without hitting the thread that I tie up so they were the winners. They enjoy it. I took them outside and did a lot of activities. (Sasikarn) These were not necessarily activities that she had learnt on any teacher-training course as she noted ‘‘that kind of activity, outdoors activity, I got it from the scout camp. I just adapt into English” (Sasikarn). She thus showed that an imaginative teacher can overcome the constraints of a resource-poor school and make use of the everyday environment in creative ways to promote students’ learning. Classroom teaching and the methods that these teachers used are, then, many, varied and frequently imaginative. What unites them all is that selection of methods is based on an understanding of the needs of the students in their particular situations. Some of the teachers combined the curriculum requirement of a communicative approach with older traditional methods – grammar translation – when circumstances required it; while others based their practice on communicative methods alone. However, the basic principle in the selection of methods as revealed in the data is always to meet the needs of the students at the particular stage of their school career, and sometimes it is examination needs which predominate. 4.2. Commitment to teaching There is ample evidence in the interviews that these particular teachers had a strong belief in and commitment to the value of their work; its value to students in their schools and to society at large. These are aspects of what Lortie (1984) called the ‘psychic rewards’ of teaching which are central to teacher commitment and which often serve as a counterbalance to the negative factors surrounding teaching summarised by Do¨rnyei (2001, p. 174–175) such as: high stress levels; increasing restrictions on teacher autonomy; difficulties of maintaining intellectual challenge in the face of curriculum and classroom routinization; and poor economic rewards compared to other professions. The commitment of these teachers came from outside as well as from within the individual. Sudarat, for example, drew strength from her family: ‘‘My family helped me a lot, especially my mother.” But she derived her primary commitment from a desire to help her students to realise their potential and from wanting to help improve English teaching in Thailand. A strong sense of duty and integrity comes across in these comments: When I taught at [previous] school I wanted to make my students enter university, as many students as possible. . . . [Now] I plan to help my students and I plan to help Thailand in terms of teachers of English. I would like to see English teachers improve in their careers more than this. I would like to see good models of teachers and I would like to see Thai students speak English more fluently than nowadays. (Sudarat) In common with teachers in many other countries, hard work was sometimes motivated by economic necessity as well as being a quality of the individual. Naraporn’s working commitments, in addition to her duties at school, encompassed part-time weekend teaching at the local Teachers’ College and private tuition after school hours. She was also writing a series of textbooks and studying part-time for a PhD in educational administration at a local university. Her only free time was one Sunday every two weeks when she got up ‘‘late in the morning about six o’clock, normally I start at five” (Naraporn) and spent time with her family. She felt strongly that her contented home life – ‘‘My husband is just like my close friend. And my three boys, we feel very close” (Naraporn) – enabled her to do more than others could do. But her willingness to work long hours on her textbooks was also motivated by a desire to show what it was possible for Thai teachers to achieve: The main thing, I would like to present my ideas to the world, to show everyone that Thai teachers, Thai local teachers can do this kind of thing. I would like to show them that. (Naraporn)
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Commitment to their work was also manifested in the everyday, local actions that these teachers took with their school students. From observation it was clear that Sasikarn was a skilled classroom practitioner with the ability to empathise with her students and develop in them a desire to learn. She recalled the situation when she moved to her second school and had (as is common with teachers new to a school) been given an M6 class considered by other teachers to contain a large number of ‘naughty’ boys. The naughtiness was restricted to many of the students skipping class regularly but this was potentially damaging to them as 80% attendance was required in order for students to pass the course and so graduate from school. Rather than leave the students to their own devices Sasikarn made the effort to persuade them back to class. So I just try to look for them and then, you know, talk to them – not like in other teachers’ ways but in my way. I gave them the good reasons to come to the class and what will happen if they skip the class [. . .] but if they come back and start the lesson they have a chance to pass. (Sasikarn) When asked if they did return she said: Yeah, they did. [. . .] I was happy about these students and then they remembered me after they graduated from the school. They came back and they said ‘‘Thank you very much, Ajarn [Thai for ‘teacher’]. At least I know something, I learnt something from you.” That’s the good thing. (Sasikarn) Sasikarn has always gained immense satisfaction from doing her job well in the classroom, and, as we can see from her reactions above, she embodies a ‘culture of care’ (Nias, 1999) in the classroom. This care extends from her concern for the social as well as academic welfare of her students to the amount of effort she puts into her own lesson preparation to provide her students with fulfilling classroom experiences. When asked if she enjoyed being a teacher she said: Yes, especially teaching in the classroom. And especially when I, you know, work to prepare for the lesson and the students interact in the class, that’s the best. But if I don’t have time to prepare, I just use my experience and talk to the students in the classroom without materials or without techniques, it’s very boring. (Sasikarn) Here she notes that for her the time to plan lessons is important and thus lack of time to plan properly impacts on the quality of the classroom experience for both her students and herself. Lack of planning time is directly related to the other duties teaches in Thai schools are required to perform. It is expected that all Thai teachers will undertake administrative duties beyond their usual teaching loads of some 20–24 fifty-minute periods a week. Naraporn worked in the academic administrative section in her school; Ladda worked with her school’s research section, overseeing projects to implement educational reform; while Arunee, Sasikarn, Sudarat and Suthee all worked (or had worked) in the national in-service training network of English Resource and Instruction Centres (ERICs), responsible for developing and running courses for teachers in their provinces; and Naraporn, Sasikarn and Suthee had also been required to act as master of ceremonies at formal school events. Arunee and Sasikarn had twice been and Arunee continued to be head of the English department in their schools. These administrative duties, which Ladda reported in schools to vary from such things as working in ‘‘the school canteen, about testing food” to overseeing ‘‘the discipline of the students” place considerable demands on the time of all teachers. Similar experience of teacher overload has been reflected elsewhere (for examples from other countries see e.g. Helsby, 2000; Klette, 2000; Munthe, 2003; RobertsHolmes, 2003) and is part of what seems to be a general trend towards the ‘intensification of teachers’ work’ (Hargreaves, 1994) which, as we have noted from Do¨rnyei (2001), is a significant counterweight to the positive, psychic rewards of teaching. However, enjoyment in the interaction with students, in helping them to learn, remains a major source of satisfaction for teachers, whatever their situation. As Estola et al. (2003, p. 239) found: ‘‘Vocation is ultimately adopted in practice and it shapes practice.” Certainly, enjoyment in teaching was a universal theme amongst the informants here – ‘‘I always enjoy teaching, no matter where” as Suthee said – and the desire to teach well a strong motivating force – ‘‘The thing that stimulates me is I just would like to be a good teacher” as Ladda said. Teachers here also recognise that their impact on students can extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom, as we have seen from how Sasikarn was concerned that her ‘naughty’ students did not harm their prospects of graduation from school. Sasikarn makes clear that in the final analysis dedication
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to work is a personal responsibility. She works ‘‘because I would like to do it. I enjoy doing it. It’s my job. Whenever I was assigned to do something, I’ll do my best”. Some teachers will always give everything they can to their work, while others will not. Some are always striving to improve themselves so that they can do their jobs better while others are not. In this respect teaching is no different to any other profession. All the Thai informants seemed to share a desire for self-improvement, taking higher degrees where possible and taking advantage of in-service training opportunities. Sasikarn, for example, stated that she went to take a diploma and then MA in TEFL as well as going to America for a year on a teacher exchange programme because ‘‘My knowledge is just this bit, only tiny bit” and ‘‘My English is not good enough, yes. My duty comes first, my English is not good enough”. From the discussion it seems to be clear that if we consider what makes an effective, successful teacher we have to go far beyond the boundaries of the technical aspects of teaching – the methods used in the classroom. Methods are important but they are just one aspect of a teacher’s effectiveness. Other characteristics are equally important and we can turn to the perspectives of one of the Thai teachers for an overview. Suthee gave a number of key qualities for success in teaching – hard work, devotion, sincerity, honesty, trust, helpfulness and friendliness. Suthee did not consider methods to be so important if these were visualized as uncritical adherence to one method – ‘‘We can’t strictly follow one particular method” – but more important was a principled selection of methods based on the students’ background, situation and needs which took full account of the humanity of the individual. As he said: When I teach I teach the students and I teach the subject matter. I teach the human being as well. I see him as a human being and also I give, I provide knowledge. The value of using a variety of methods was also recognised by Sudarat. In her advice to other teachers, she declared it was important to be open to ideas from whatever source and that any technique had potential usefulness in Thailand if adapted: Don’t be ‘anti’ any techniques – ‘Oh, this is not good for Thai people’ – you can adapt any teaching approach, any teaching techniques to use with your students. 5. Conclusion The teachers’ perspectives discussed here contribute, I feel, to a vision of ELT classroom practice as a response to the locally-situated needs of the participants (Butler, 2005; Canagarajah, 2005; Mangubhai et al., 2005) and suggest that the ELT profession needs to acknowledge a richer and more varied picture of classroom life than one sanctioned by official curricula; one in which there is an acceptance that ‘traditional’ forms of instruction persist for a reason, and that to uncover the reason there is a need to investigate the sociocultural and educational contexts of use of the methods. This is corroborated by Hu’s (2005) finding that the use of particular methods by groups of teachers in China correlated with particular socio-economic and cultural conditions, encompassing disparities in the availability of subject resources, school facilities, the quality of the teaching force vis-a`-vis government minimum professional requirements, access to authentic language outside the class and differing views on the value of English in terms of economic and social capital. The research here argues that investigation of socio-cultural and educational contexts in which classroom teaching is enacted is crucial to the understanding of local practices. This understanding will, in turn, contribute to correcting a monolithic view of ELT based on western conceptions of idealised practice. More research of this kind is, in consequence, needed to enrich our collective understanding of the global practices of ELT in its many and varied local contexts. Further, our professional discourse of ELT as a global profession masks the reality that for many NNESTs – unlike highly mobile NS teachers – their primary professional identity is as career teachers within their own societies, with the wider social responsibilities that such an identity entails. These social responsibilities are strongly represented in the commitment of the teachers here to their work as teachers of English in the Thai education system and they demonstrate situational teaching competence. Teachers’ ‘nativeness’ in this respect needs to be given its due prominence in understandings of teaching and learning English as a foreign language in context, rather than disproportionate attention paid to ‘nonnativeness’ in terms of English language competence.
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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Thai teachers who gave so freely of their time to provide the data on which this article is based. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which have helped to strengthen the article immensely. Any remaining flaws are, of course, my own. Appendix A. Interview topic areas Reasons for becoming a teacher Family background Present post – How long here – Classes taught – Thoughts about teaching – Enjoyment – Motivation – Dislikes – School administration – Induction – Staff–student relationships Own schooling Pre-service training In-service training Other formal qualifications Other posts Teachers and society English – Its position in the country – Attitudes to English
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