Sound Barriers

Sound Barriers:

Teaching English in Thailand

Teaching English in a Thai village has been a non-stop learning experience, at least for me. This post is about what I’ve come to think of as “sound barriers” for Thai students. As you read, remember that describing how Thais learn English is only description, not a value judgment. To any Thai teachers who may be reading this: Please post descriptions of sound barriers you run into when teaching Thai language to Americans!

Thais have their own accent when speaking English – just like people from everywhere else, including other English-speaking countries. The students are used to English with a Thai accent – my American accent sounds wrong to them. There’s a learning curve on both sides: I must learn what the built-in barriers are, and students must try to match what they hear me say to what they’ve heard in other English classes.

Thai students have trouble with the sounds “th” and “sh,” which don’t exist in Thai. Word pairs like thing and sing, thirteen and fourteen, chair and share, ship and chip sound alike to them. Do you watch or wash your hair?  Cash or catch a bus? Obviously, every language student struggles with sounds that don’t occur in their native language, but in Thailand, the students’ English textbooks add to the inherent difficulty in unexpected ways. The glossaries often contain pronunciation help in the form of English words spelled with Thai letters. Sounds that don’t exist in the Thai language will be written with a Thai letter that is “close” to the English sound  -- a Thai letter for the sound “ch” is used for words with “sh.”  English “th” is spelled with a Thai letter for the sound “t.” – Of course, Thai students spontaneously say “tree” for “three” and “chirt” for “shirt” anyway, but the glossaries create the impression that these are the correct pronunciations. This is an example of what I mean by a built-in barrier. My co-teacher and I try to overcome it with phonics-based lessons.

The consonants “r” and “l” are difficult too. Multiple factors come into play. For one, native speakers in most parts of Thailand substitute “l” for “r” in everyday speech: rak [to love] becomes “lak,” for example, and roong rian [school] is “loong lian.” This is just ordinary colloquial speech, not an error – the speakers know how these words are pronounced in Standard Thai. If you ask them whether these words are spelled with the letter law-ling or raw-reua, they tell you, correctly, raw-reua. (You can find both letters in the chart of Thai consonants below by looking at the pictures:  ling = monkey; reua = rowboat).

When speaking English, Thais often reverse “l” and “r” – that is, they say “r” where the English word has “l” and vice versa. So if I’m teaching words for occupations and show a picture of a pilot, I should also have a picture of a pirate handy to help students understand, and better hear, which sound goes with which word.  

 Of course, pictures aren’t much help with “labbit” instead of rabbit or “rike” instead of like – here, we resort to old-fashioned “make your mouth like this” advice. The sounds “l” and “r” aren’t exactly identical in English and Thai either, which makes it harder for the students to know which sound they are hearing in spoken English.  

Another difficulty is that the sound “l” doesn’t occur in word-final position in the Thai language, so students don’t know how to say “l” at the end of a word and substitute “n” – school becomes “skoon” and football is “footbon.”  Here, the complicating factor is in Thai spelling: the sound “l” doesn’t occur in word-final position, but the Thai letter for “l” does – pronounced “n.”  That makes it interesting for us foreigners learning to read Thai and failing to recognize common words when we see them in print. Recently, I was stumped trying to decipher the Thai word dtambon (= a subdivision of a district; a word I learned to say, but not spell, months ago).  If I “spell” that word by matching Thai letters to English letters, it looks like this: dtambl.  Of course, that word-final “l” is pronounced “n” in Thai.

There are 44 Thai consonant letters, and 32 vowels. One vowel that is confusing for Thai learners of English is the short “e” sound of head, guest, test, etc. Thai people tend to pronounce these words with the vowel of hate, gate, and taste, because there’s no Thai vowel sound exactly like that short “e.”  During vocab practice for parts of the body, students often say “hen” after hearing me say “head” (while pointing to a picture of a head). I believe this is at least partly because they’ve heard “head” pronounced as “hade” by Thai speakers.  Again, it’s best to have a picture of a hen tucked in with the body parts flash cards to help get through the sound barrier.  

 -- For my part, when my co-teacher says she’s going to have a test, I always think she’s going to eat something.

I could rattle off lots more examples of English sounds that give Thai students fits, but maybe these are enough to give you an idea of what my students and I deal with while trying to get through the sound barriers.

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When reciting the Thai alphabet, students say the letter (e.g., gaw) and the word that’s used as a mnemonic, e.g., gai [=chicken], like this: gaw-gai, kaw-kai [= egg], kaw-kuat [=bottle], and so on. The mnemonics are a handy way to specify different letters for the same sound (there are 5 different letters for “k” sounds, for example).