Thai students in Bangkok
English presents particular difficulties for learners depending on their educational background and mother tongue.
When learning a foreign language, the educational background is very important. If a person who studies English has previously studied another foreign language, then it will be easier for him/her to learn English. One of the reasons is that he/she already knows how to assimilate new vocabulary, and, above all, is not afraid of speaking another tongue. We assume the fact that this type of learner has been in a learning environment for a longer period of time than a learner of English who has not studied any other foreign language, thus making it easier for him/her to take a role as a student.
The mother tongue is also important due to the fact that the learner has a specific mind set regarding languages. Take, for example, Thai students who are not used to verb tenses, inflections, and the sentence structure that the English language possesses. Therefore, due to the fact that the Thai language does not have tenses, one major problem for thai students when learning English is to understand the tense differences.
It is also very difficult for Thai students to understand the structure of different parts of speech, such as the predicate. A common mistake is the misuse of auxiliary verbs. Thai students would rather say “I eating now.” instead of “I’m eating now.” or “Where you go?” instead of “Where are you going?”
It is also important to bear in mind the fact that the Thai language has a different writing system, where there are no capital letters, no spaces between words, nor any kind of punctuation marks. Thus, Thai students frequently spell proper nouns without a capital letter, do not understand the role of comma, and do not use punctuation marks at the end of sentences.
Due to the fact that Thai is a tonal language, Thai students pronounce English words highly influenced by the way the Thai language sounds. A very common mistake is the way they pronounce words that have been coined in Thai from English. For example, the word ‘chocolate’ is pronounced /cho-ko-let/ instead of /cho-klet/.
Another common mistake is the way Thai students stress words, again influenced by the way the Thai language sounds. For example, the word ‘salary’ is pronounced /sal-la-ree/ instead of /sal-la-ree/.
We can conclude that different learners encounter different difficulties when learning English. In the case of Thai students, some of their difficulties are in acquiring vocabulary, understanding tenses, pronunciation, and stress (both intonation and syllable stress).
An earlier draft was also publised in
„Horizons – The Journal of David’s English Teaching World”
(Issue 5, September 2008)
