If you work in a Thai Elementary school, and you have a separate English program where kids only come to you, say 2 to 3 times a week for about 45 minutes each time, here are a few:

> Make sure to include short games in your classes. The Thais are all about fun; "sanook-sanook" will always win your students' hearts, and will always have them readily practice the language you try so hard to teach.

> In general, your Thai students won't have any other opportunities to speak English outside your classroom, so even if you have a class of 30 or 40, do try to find creative ways to get them to speak the target language in each of your classes.

> Use pictures, drama, music and realia in your lessons. Remember that your students learn in different ways, and you will have a much better chance to reach all of them when you employ different tools.

Here's a good starter book for grammar games. It's practically a classic.

Thanks for that, Uberdoog.

Hopefully, other teachers will find their way to this thread and get some fresh ideas to use in class since school's starting very soon!

In the English department of the Thai Primary School i first worked at, our boss kind of solved that problem about having non-native speakers for teachers. Our program made use of recorded dialogues of a story, and it was in British English. And so, though teachers all come from different backgrounds, and therefore, spoke in different accents, our students had just one model of the English language - the one that they hear from the tapes, which we played out when we were at the stage of modeling the language.

In retrospect, I think that worked very well. And the students were also into the story, so much so that after a few years of being in the program, many of the kids, if not most, were proficient speakers of English on a basic conversational level.

Then we made use of lots of educational videos to supplement the learning, as well as arts and crafts.

If anybody is interested, try looking up the Chatterbox set of language materials. They come in both American and British English, and they have materials from Levels 1 to 6. They are very teacher friendly, with a student's book, an activity book, a cassette tape, and a teacher's book. The teacher's book is exceptionally good 'coz it contained many useful ideas on how to teach the target language.

STT vs. TTT


STT stands for Student-Talking Time and TTT is Teacher Talking Time.

You are the teacher and definitely not in the class to impress or the one that needs further speaking exercises. It helps for one to go for STT and be aware of that in classes. This can be done effectively with the help of lesson planning and time budgeting.

So get your students to speak, and be fair. Make sure that each can get their dose of the speaking exercises regardless of their levels. It needs patience and discipline but in time, it will boost your students' confidence in the language.

Another classic book on Teaching ESL is Jeremy Harmer's "How to Teach English." It used to be the textbook for the RSA CELTA program which, incidentally, is offered there in Thailand at the ECC-Thai (Siam Square, near Chulalongkorn). ECC-Thai CELTA

Have 'special days/treats' for your students. Perhaps, this can be done on Fridays, or once every two weeks, for instance. Show them a movie, which is, of course, age appropriate, relevant in terms of language, and free of foul or swear words/nudity/very graphic killing scenes/violence.

Students will benefit a lot when you expose them to a variety of media to learn English language. Movies are also great in terms of modeling conversational English. And of course, learning always comes easy when your learners are having fun.

Hey teachers, please share your strategies, best tips, etc. so others may also learn and benefit from the sharing of ideas.