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Ever in search of the magic bullet or ideal course materials for
learning a foreign language, and an exotic one at that, two enterprising
teams in England and Australia, respectively, have come up with new
offerings for Thai.
Colloquial Thai: A Complete Language Course begins with a Mr.
Ken Stevens, British businessman, learning to say (polite) "Hello" in
lesson 1, and able, fifteen lessons later able to track down Khun Suporn
to nail down an export deal. Be assured that this is a "man's book."
Women should look elsewhere to learn the Thai they need for their survival.
The lessons constitute a "complete" language course in that they
purport to teach one to comprehend and talk about basic needs and
business tasks and to learn the rudiments for reading very simple Thai
(e.g., signs, notes) in indigenous orthography. Very much in tune with
current trends in second language acquisition, the course aims to teach
competency using contextualized dialogs representing authentic speech.
There are two types of dialogs: short ones for production and longer ones
for comprehension. The latter are followed by a couple of questions that
call for inferencing, an important skill for the language learner to
develop. I can remember when my-nine-year old son was with me one summer
in Chiangmai, and he would turn to me every once in a while and ask me if
his surmises about what the servant and the heads of the household were
talking about were correct. They usually were; his audacity paid off.
At the end of 8 weeks, he was able to escort his visiting American aunt
by mini-bus into town, where he knew (after he bargained with the
merchants in Thai) that he could get her to buy some of the trinkets he
had his eye on for some time. The listening comprehension exercises in
Colloquial Thai promote a similar "natural" approach to acquisition, and
this is the strength of the course.
Grammar and cultural notes are presented in an interesting and
clear manner. Useful exercises are part of each lesson The cumulative
vocabulary is in the range of 300 items. Were one a disciplined student
who set out to master the contents of this book, ideally with a linguist
or native speaker as tutor, survival Thai would be the most that would be
achieved. The level of sophistication of the conversations does not rise
much above talk about money (who is rich and who isn't), girlfriends
(echoes of bar talk), and trade (getting down to business), but the
culture notes are mindful in ways that would prevent the (male) student
from becoming boorish.
If language teachers could be sued for malpractice, however, the
book's authors, whose backgrounds are not given, would be in serious
trouble. They use a layman's type of transliteration that is an
abomination. Matters are made worse by providing an even more ludicrous
pronunciation key to their misleading system. Thus, they say that their
eu sounds approximately like "ugh" (short) and their euh like "ugh"
(long)! While there is a brief discussion of the tones of Standard Thai,
nowhere is there an indication that vowel length produces lexical
change. Editors who supervise the publication of these types of language
courses for the unsuspecting should be locked up for life for not
requiring more linguistic integrity than is represented in these pages.
Fortunately there is a brighter light. In recent years, scholars
at The Australian National University have been publishing a variety of
Thai language course materials in several media formats: books, audio
cassettes, video cassettes, and computer software. In conjunction with
other texts, I have used several segments of Life and Language: Thai
Language Videos, with Transcripts in Thai and Phonetics, Vocabulary
Lists, Translation and Notes with great success in my beginning and
intermediate Thai classes. The materials were videotaped on the campus
of Silapakorn University in Nakorn Pathom, Thailand. The action centers
around the daily life of two Thai professors, husband and wife, and their
two young daughters. Thus, there is both gender and age equity in this
sequence of lessons. While the family lifestyle strikes one as being
overly-Westernized (the couple had studied in Australia), serious
students of these lessons are more than likely to have relationships with
the level of Thai society or higher represented by the family. That is
not to say that the filming perspective is elitist. Indeed, one of the
more interesting episodes is an interview with a young pedicab driver
whose low economic status yet high aspirations for the education of his
two children are poignantly presented. There are also colorful episodes dealing with a male fortune teller and traders in a fresh food market,
predominantly women. A half-dozen articulate male and female students,
voicing opinions on everything from their favorite foods to the status of
Thai women, are interviewed, giving the viewer/learner multiple speaker
styles and socio-linguistic perspectives. Also captured on camera is a
striking diversity of "racial" features: light to dark skin, Sinitic to
Negrito. No, refreshingly, all Thais do not look and speak alike.
Contextualized and authentic language cannot be denied in these
filmed lessons, even though it is obvious that everything has been
carefully scripted in advance. For the non-novice learner, these lessons
are a joy. The accompanying texts employ a phonemic transcription that
is unambiguous and universally accepted, as well as the same enactments
spelled out in Thai script. I happen to be an advocate of early and
exclusive use of Thai script from the outset, and my students will read
directly from the Thai, except when they are unsure and check their
suppositions against the phonemic representation.
The recently prepared Thai language materials from Australia are
intelligently executed. The enterprise was made possible by a sizable
earlier grant from the Australian national government, and these are the
laudable results of that wise investment. The Language and Life video,
in particular, probably points to an eventual CD-ROM course. But for the
time being, we are served well by this fine, professional production.
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yui@alpha.tu.ac.th)