Art Competition

According to the foreign language curriculum guidelines from the Thai Ministry of Education, students should have a vocabulary of 2,500 words by the time they finish Mathyom (secondary) 3. That begs the question: what does it mean to have a word in your vocabulary?

Traditionally, in Thai schools, it means simply knowing the word's nominal translation, spelling, and perhaps a rough approximation of its pronunciation. I remember when I first started in this job, showing a picture of a cat to a student, asking what it was, and he proudly responding: "c cat maew", maew being the Thai word for cat. I tried to explain to him that the "c" and the "maew" were really unnecessary; that just "cat" would be fine, but he'd have none of it. "c cat maew” is what had been drilled in to him and “c cat maew” was what he was going to regurgitate!

To break through this kind of thinking, I've been setting up a picture bank of as much common vocabulary as possible. Of course, simply replacing translation with pictures is not going to solve the problem by itself, but it does contribute to the solution.

To that end, we're having an art competition at Ban Chamkho School. Meg O'Connell, a young volunteer from Australia, has come to help out this month, so this has been a good project for her to get her teeth into. Hopefully, Meg will blog a bit about her experiences here before she heads off back to Australia next month.

This Wednesday (14 November 2007), we'll announce the competition to the students, together with target vocab lists for each of Anuban (kindergarten), Prathom (primary) 1-3, Prathom 4-6, and Mathayom 1-3. If all goes to plan, our picture bank should have about 160 new items by the end of the month.

Each winning entry will receive prize money of 5 Baht (call me Mr Generosity ), and more importantly, the honor of being used in our learning materials. So expect some additions to our Downloads section, as Thais love to say, “coming sooooon”.