The Ministry of Education (2008) demonstrates their belief in the importance of English by including it in the core curriculum of both primary and secondary school. The main purpose of the basic education core curriculum for communication is to provide students with the ability to acquire and transmit information, feeling and opinion. Learners should develop the ability to solve problems and conflicts. Learners should also be able to choose information to accept or reject through their own reasoning and judgment.
It is acknowledged that currently listening and speaking in Thailand is not successful despite studying for many years. One of the problems, which lead to lack of success in English learning in Thailand, is that the classroom environment is overly stressful for learners. A British Council expert in teacher education in Thailand, Moutford(1986) point out some serious problems of language teaching in Thailand such as the dry teaching style and overly concern on grammar details, inappropriate texts that are not related to learner and not giving learners a chance to interact with each other in classroom. Another problem is that class activities do not support enough language listening and speaking practice. This leaves earners with lower communications skills. The result of this is that learners lack the ability to transfer their skills from the classroom into the real world. Suan Dusit Poll (The Nation, 2004) show that 95 percent of Bangkok citizens said English was very important for a career and 5 percent said English was mostly for basic communication.