The findings showed that participants faced difficulties using English while
training at a high level. As mentioned earlier, most of them agreed that listening was
difficult. The possible reason for this which provided by one of the respondents is that
they could not understand the speakers, especially non-native English speaker such as
Singaporean, Indian, Philippines, and Chinese, as they assimilated English
pronunciation to their native pronunciation, highlighting the sound /t/ as a good
example of this. An explanation of this is that sound will be assimilated to /ต/ when
Indian people pronounce it. Among English consonants, the sound /t/ is an alveolar
voiceless stop that is pronounced in a plosive, manner of articulation, and the sound
productions with the sound /ต/ in Indian consonants. Therefore, when speaking
English, Indian people tend to change the target language consonant sounds that do
not have the phonetic features of their mother tongue to the sounds that they are
famil with (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams 2007). Another reason may be that Thai
people are not native English speakers so they would normally be unfamiliar with
English. Another possible reason is that, they do not have a good knowledge of
English vocabulary. It is said that listening skills are more difficult than any other
skills. It needs a basic knowledge of grammar, vocabulary coherence, cohesion,
idioms, expressions and so forth (Mohiden H. cited Corder, 1974). However,
according to the results, they did not confront the problem so much in reading skills.
Nevertheless, in each skill, there are also remarkable points that are worth discussing,
which are described below: