The Cow Said "Pig"?

The Cow Said “Pig”?

And Other Mysteries of Old MacDonald ‘s Farm

In January, it was decided that our school’s “English on Mondays” program was too limited for its goal of encouraging more students and teachers to speak English. So now, I’m to teach a few words of English to the students assembled at the flagpole every morning, after the daily rituals – the principal’s announcements, a story from the Jataka Tales, flag-raising and national anthem, prayers, and other business – are finished.

You may ask what it’s like to teach English to 600+ students from grades 1 through 12 who’ve been restless for about 30 minutes already and are hoping to be dismissed with time to play before classes start at 9am. Not exactly a cakewalk. Even 15 minutes is a lot of time to fill while trying to hold students’ attention in this situation. Thankfully, the time allotted has now been reduced from 15 minutes to five. Whew.

My teaching strategies so far consist of singing and TPR (=Total Physical Response). TPR is based on having learners associate actions with words, starting with simple action verbs such as stand up, sit down, run, dance, walk, skip, clap your hands, stomp your feet, turn around, etc.  Students listen, watch the teacher, and demonstrate that they understand the words by performing the actions. They learn to say the words before long, after listening and doing the actions many times. To keep it a bit more interesting while constantly recycling the same vocabulary, the students can be asked to do the actions fast or slow, or from right to left, backward or forward, or ask the boys to do one thing and the girls another. This last ploy always gets laughs from the students who were paying attention, at the expense of those who weren’t – inevitably there are boys who clap when I say “Girls, please clap your hands” and girls who dance when I say “Boys, please dance.” 

Since attention spans are not greater in Thailand than in the US, it’s best to change the activity or sing a different song about once a minute. Thai students like to sing, especially songs with actions to accompany the words, and they like to sing the same songs again and again. Walking to or from school, I usually hear neighborhood children singing lines from songs they learned at flagpole. The pictures below show me teaching the song “Good Morning,” which I got from a web site called dreamenglish.com – you can visit it if you want to learn the song yourself.

Raising arms for "Good Morning"

Holding arms out to spin around

A few brave students singing with me and a colleague

To teach a song that doesn’t have actions, I make some up, a strategy that can backfire if the actions aren’t familiar to the learners. I thought it would be fun to teach “Zip a dee doo dah,” snapping my fingers each time you sing “Zip,” and skipping to and fro on “my oh my what a wonderful day.” Trouble was, many or maybe most of the children couldn’t snap their fingers, which slowed us down a bit while they concentrated on trying to do it, ignoring the words. Now, about four weeks later, quite a few can snap their fingers very, er, snappily, even if they still haven’t got the words to the song down pat. But hey, progress is progress.

So, what about the topic of this post, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” I thought this song would be easy for our students to learn – and sure enough, they all caught on to “e-i-e-i-o” almost instantly. However, they didn’t sing along with “on this farm he had a cow” or “moo, moo here” etc. as I had expected, and gave me blank looks when I repeated the lines. The reason is simple enough, and I should have anticipated it. Thai people say that the cow (wua) says “maw maw,” not “moo moo” – which sounds to them like the Thai word for “pig” (muu).  So when they heard “with a moo moo here, moo moo there” the students no doubt thought I was saying “pig pig.”  What sense does that make? No wonder they didn’t sing along.

Just to keep things interesting, the pig doesn’t say “oink oink” in Thai, but “oot oot,” and the duck doesn’t say “quack quack,” but “gop gop.”  At least “oink” and “quack” don’t sound like Thai names of other farm animals, so that’s some consolation. The duck is difficult for another reason, however – Thai people have a hard time hearing the difference between “duck” and “dog,” and tend to pronounce the two words more or less the same. Also, dogs don’t say “bow wow” in Thai, but “hong hong.” What a zoo, uh, barnyard.

Note to self: Next time, start with the sheep, the chickens, and the cat, whose vocalizations in Thai are very similar to the ones in English.

Teaching “Old MacDonald” to Thai students made me think of our much-loved professor in the Indiana University Germanic Studies Department, Dr. Frank Banta, who died in January at the age of 95. I remembered his taking about a half hour of class one day to ask us what the various animal sounds were in the languages we knew – English, French, German, Russian, Latvian, and maybe some others. It was a fun activity – but I can’t recall what point he wanted to make.  Was it to disprove the onomatopoeia theory of the origins of human language? Was it just for our amusement?  Or what?  Maybe someone on this list who was in the same class (it was either Comparative Linguistics or History of the German Language) will remember.  – I would so like to be able to tell Frank about teaching “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to Thai students. It would probably amuse him, and maybe he’d remember what his point was in that class all those years ago.  R.I.P. Frank, you were totally the best, and we miss you acutely.