THE BILINGUAL ALTERNATIVE

A K3 class is pictured in the midst of a Thai-language activity. Kindergarten classes typically have three instructors, two Thai and one native-English speaker. The teachers for this class are (clockwise from the top) Ms.Jitra Khaodokbua, Mr. Yu-Li Hu (Australian), and Ms. Watanya Suttayapanich. With the completion of the kindergarten building, this room will become one of the three rooms making up the primary school library.

Dr Arthit Ourairat

As founder and CEO of Phuket’s prestigious Dulwich International College, you might expect Dr Arthit Ourairat to be a leading proponent for the international school option in Thailand. Well, he is — to a point.

“Dulwich is excellent,” he told the learning post recently at his office at Rangsit University, where he is president, “but it is not the kind of school that is best suited to most Thai students.

“Dulwich has a British curriculum. The students come from 24 or 25 countries and the teachers come from all over the world. Consequently, at Dulwich, they don’t care so much about the Thai language, Thai history or Thai culture. What they do in those fields is very superficial. It’s not deep-rooted. So that’s not the solution for Thai students as a whole.”

Dr Arthit is all for giving Thai students an international outlook and the English language skills to allow them to become effective global citizens, but, he says, this should be done in a way that is tailored to their particular needs.”

For him, this means a bilingual approach where both English and Thai are used as the medium of instruction. “But this does not mean you just add two languages together and teach,” he cautions. “You have to blend them in such a way that you have the most appropriate curriculum for Thai students.”

In a nutshell, that is goal of Dr Arthit’s latest foray into education with the establishment of the brand-new Satit Bilingual School of Rangsit University (SBS). The ultra-modern facility, located in a spacious plot of land next to the main campus in Muang Ake, Patumthani, opened its doors last June with 450 students ranging from pre-kindergarten to Matayom 1 (M1). Intentions are to add one additional level each year through to M6.

What sets this school apart from many other schools with bilingual programmes is its ambition. At Rangsit, school officials are aiming not just to promote proficiency in English and Thai, but for true bilingualism in which the students can move seamlessly from one language and culture to the other. That is a tall order, but one that school advisor Dr Vichai Tunsiri believes is definitely possible.

Dr Vichai Tunsiri

“If you plan far enough ahead from kindergarten or from primary one to grade 12, they should be able to pick up English on the way,” asserts the former deputy minister of education and a long-time colleague of Dr Arthit. “In fact, with our native English teachers, our children should be able to communicate in both English and Thai equally well.”

What the school needs now is to develop the best system to do this, he says. In that sense, the roongrian satit might best be thought of a “laboratory school” and not a “demonstration school”, the traditional translation.

SBS will certainly not lack advisors. Housed in the very same complex is Rangsit University’s brand-new Masters of Bilingual Education department, Thailand’s first such degree. Both its dean and associate dean are active members of the school board.

Jamie Wallinion

According to Associate Dean Dr Jamie Wallin, one initiative that has already resulted is a twinning project with Jakarta’s Global Jaya bilingual school. “They’ve been open 10 years, so we think they have a lot to offer. At the same time, we’ve got ideas that they are interested in,” Dr Wallin says.

Consistent with the laboratory theme, Masters candidates will — within limits — conduct research in the school, says Dr Wallin. “We have to be very sensitive on that issue because as intruders, we always have to act with parental understanding and permission.”

On the surface, SBS has the look and feel of an international school. The facilities rival those found at any of the top schools, even surpassing some of them. Classroom organisation and teaching styles are also very similar.

Scratch the surface, however, and there are distinct differences. One of the most obvious is the place of the national language. Missing is the obsessive "you must speak English" atmosphere found at some of the stricter international schools. The children are neither punished nor discouraged from speaking Thai. Given the choice, the reasoning goes, Thai students will naturally use Thai with their peers outside of class.

Edward Robinson

The classroom is a different matter, however, says primary principal Edward Robinson. There, the language spoken will naturally gravitate towards the language used as the medium of instruction.

“Generally speaking, once they’re in a classroom and they are studying in a subject in that language, the classroom environment should evolve so that is the expected language in that environment,” Robinson says. “Just like when a bilingual child is speaking with one parent, they speak in one language and when they speak with another who speaks a different language, they’ll speak in that language.”

Dr Boonsri Cheevakumjorn and Dr Ruja Phosward

A second noticeable difference at the school is the very active role the Thai administrators take in curricular matters. This is partly because the school follows the Thai national curriculum but it is also because the school’s key executives have considerable expertise in bilingual education.

School director Dr Ruja Phosward, for example, is both an expert in first- and second-language acquisition and a keen researcher. Kindergarten principal Dr Boonsri Cheevakumjorn is a strong proponent of progressive bilingual education, allowing youngsters free rein to explore their dual-language environment rather than bogging them down prematurely with an academic-oriented programme.

SBS’s kindergarten accepts children as young as 3. The goal in the earliest years, says Dr Ruja, is to allow the children to develop their language skills gradually in a way that makes they feel positively towards both Thai and English.

Language input at this level is heavily weighted towards English, she says, but not exclusively. “At these early ages, first language acquisition has not yet been completed," she explains.

The kindergarten programme as a whole is quite similar to that found at many international schools in both philosophy and implementation.

“Our main philosophy is that we believe that children learn from hands-on experience,” Dr Boonsri relates. “They learn from concrete things in order to get abstract meanings which they need when they go to the primary school. Most of the time we are doing interactive activities. The curriculum is integrated and project-based. We don’t segment it into subjects.

“So, if this week we are dealing with plants, all the things that they do will be within this subject. The art will be related to plants, the science will be hands on like having them grow things.

“They also have free play a lot of the time because we believe there are a lot of things they will have to explore and we want to them to learn to be inquisitive,” Dr Boonsri explains.

Beginning at the primary level, the ratio of English to Thai becomes more evenly balanced. English, science and maths are taught in English, while Thai and social studies are taught in Thai. Closely knit team teaching is the norm in each class, a system that, thus far, seems to be remarkably successful.

Richard Theze

“I would say that it works, definitely,” says second-grade teacher Richard Theze. “Each of the homeroom teachers has a Thai national co-teacher who is responsible for teaching the Thai part of the curriculum. So 50 percent of the time they’re listening to their native language and reading and writing in their native language. For the other half of the curriculum, they’re taught by native speakers of English.”

Progress in English has been remarkable fast, he says. “Some of my students didn’t know English at all when they came in. Now we’re six months down the line and I can communicate effectively in English with every single one of my students. So it works.”

A big reason seems to be that the Thai teachers have avoided becoming crutches for their students. They do not allow them to tune out of instruction in English only to fill them in later in Thai.

In any event, first-grade teacher Methinee (May) Sawangsri says student questions tend to be much more about how to express themselves to their English teachers rather than the classroom content.

“The kids really don’t ask questions about what they are studying. At first, they didn’t know what to say to the teacher and they would ask what they should say and I would tell them. But I wouldn’t ask the questions for them. They had to do that themselves,” Methinee states firmly.

Pranesha Naidoo and Methinee Sawangsri

South African-born Pranesha Naidoo, Methinee’s co-teacher, says the two of them work very closely together and this has eased her burden considerably. “At the beginning of the year, we decided that we’d sit together and we’d come up with a plan for the whole class. When we got the kids at the beginning, we found that they hardly knew any English. Some of them had zero English. So I asked May at the beginning to translate a few instructions. That went on for about a month. Now, May hardly translates for me,” Pranesha relates.

“It’s wonderful and I can see the difference that it has made in the lives of the students both in English and in Thai. I teach English and the next period she teaches Thai. It’s just amazing to see how the kids can adapt from one language to the next. Switch on. Switch off.”

John Zermani

The man with perhaps the school’s toughest job at the moment is secondary principal John Brian Zermani. Introducing a bilingual curriculum to very young children is relatively easy because they pick up language so quickly and the concepts they deal with are not nearly so complex. Jumping in at M1 is another matter, however, especially with students who have never studied in English before.

“They’re new to a bilingual environment and they’ve come from a Thai school background,” Zermani relates. “We’ve got one or two students that have got an international grounding at some point in their education, but I think, for the most part, the M1 students are finding it a challenge.

Science is especially hard, so the school provides periodic tutorial recap sessions in Thai to smooth things along. As the school becomes more established and the students' English language proficiency improves, the intention is to shift the focus of these sessions to preparing students for taking Thai government examinations in the national language.

Zermani’s main task at the moment is developing a curriculum which remains consistent with the Thai national curriculum, but leads into the rigorous international baccalaureate (IB) diploma in the last two years.

“How to approach IB, particularly at the M3 and M4 level, is a particular challenge,” Zermani says. “The Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education is a possibility and the curriculum planning that we are doing now is assuming that is going to be the case.”

But, in the end, won’t this make SBS more like your standard international school? Not really, Zermani says. A substantial portion of the curriculum will still be taught in Thai and the mindset of the school is also quite different.

“I think there’s definitely a closer awareness on a day to day level of Thai language and Thai culture,” he says. That, after all, is exactly why Dr Arthit wanted the school established.