Three specific goals were clarified as for the students: 1) to become better
accustomed to hearing and speaking English; 2) to be able to express opinions and ideas
3
appropriately and; 3) to be able to perform a presentation with confidence. As a starting
point, video recording of the learners’ speaking English was conducted twice at the early
stage of teaching, for the students to assess their own performance in both individual
presentation and group discussion. The students had an opportunity to view the video
tape a week later after the recording and benchmark their own performance without my
comment on the language they used except on the clarification of the content. It was
made clear to the students; especially the ones who are Thai, that I did not criticize them
because it might lower their self-confidence of speaking English. However, as I expected,
the Thai teachers rely mostly on reading their notes instead of speaking freely based on
their understanding of the concepts. For the rest of the semester, I had to find some
effective strategies to encourage the students to speak freely as much as possible and
one of the methods I employed was Problem-based Learning Instruction (PBL).