Introduction
Thailand has the legislation in place to move from
a teacher centred to a learner centred approach to
English language education. The 1999 Education
Act details what is required; however, the
implementation of the act has been an extremely
slow process, resulting in little or no progress in
some rural areas of Thailand. The reasons why
Thai students have low performance in English is
detailed by Punthumasen (2008), in that they find
learning English boring and they do not like the
teaching methods. They also complain about the
materials and the surrounding where they are
being taught as well as there not being enough
language learning technology, especially in rural
areas. The problem with rural areas is that they are
predominantly poor regions. ¡°It should be
obvious that even with schools of equal quality a
poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one¡±
(Illich 2002: 6).
Wiriyachitra (2002) states the importance of an
independent and learner-centred approach in
Thailand where analytical learning instead of rote
learning has to be incorporated. This is not the
case in many schools at this time, resulting in
Thailand marking time as the rest of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
competes in the globalised world. Furthermore,
language learning is one of the most ¡°face
threatening¡± subjects to learn at school due to the
pressure of operating using a rather limited
language code (Dornyei 2001: 40), which does not
help when matters of ¡°face¡± are deemed so
important for both teachers and students in
Thailand.
Difficulties with the implementation of
communicative language teaching (CLT) have
been highlighted by Jarvis and Atsilarat (2004) and
include low English proficiency, large class sizes,
limited time and low student
responsibility as well as the fact that students are
not comfortable with CLT. There is a danger that
the change is too great and that teachers will want
to revert back to teacher centred teaching when
the task of change becomes insurmountable
(Watts 2004). These problem areas are all relevant
to the success of this project; however, the
communicative activities detailed are only a small
part of the teaching and learning that takes place,
as these activities are seen as ¡°add-ons¡± to the
existing teaching that has already taken place.
Teachers will still conduct their lessons as they
have done before; however, there will now be a
dialogue or conversation to help reinforce the
teaching that has taken place. It is possible that
this would be the first time that students have
taken part in exercises such as this.
At the moment, there is not nearly enough
¡°comprehensible input¡± (Krashen 1997: 3) taking
place in the classroom for language acquisition to
take place, only some of the language makes sense
to the students who are studying English
(Allwright & Bailey 1991). Thailand is a good
example of where ¡°students can articulate formal
rules of grammar but cannot use them correctly in
spontaneous communication¡± (Ellis 1985: 230).
Some educational commentators would argue that
English has become an academic subject taught at
schools and is not used as a second or foreign
language in Thailand except by the rich elite.
This project came into being because of a
much larger proposal put forward to Thailand.s
Ministry of Education resulting in the request by
them for a smaller pilot project to test out the
theory. The initial proposal put forward by
Graham (2008) detailed the planning and
processes undertaken to produce English language
trainers and teaching materials for Prathom
(primary) teachers of English in Udon Thani
province. The smaller project was designed to
show what could be achieved with one school as
opposed to a whole province. The aims are
twofold; the training of primary school Thai
teachers of English to adapt to learner centred
communicative activities and secondly, the training
of their students to cope with the tasks they are
given.