The South China-Laos-Thailand region with the new railway line (Source: South China Morning Post)

Language learning through watching films and playing videogames is a new trend. This kind of informal language learning differs significantly from language learning in the classroom or in immersion contexts.

Language learning through media brings new languages to the fore that have not been widely learned in the past, and it is particularly marginalized speakers of peripheral languages for whom media provide new language learning opportunities.

Here, I will illustrate mediated language learning with the example of the Thai language learning by two groups of people marginalized in China: international students from Laos and ethnic minority youths with a Zhuang background. Both Lao and Zhuang are minor peripheral languages in the global linguistic order. And both are closely related to the Thai language.

My account here draws on the work of my students Tingjiang Ge (葛婷江), Yifan Man (满怡帆), and Xinyao Li (李欣瑶).

Students from Laos learning Chinese through Thai

Some of Van’s favorite Thai-medium Chinese dramas on her mobile

Laos is a land-locked country surrounded by China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. The recently opened railway from its capital, Vientiane, to Kunming in China will transform it from land-locked to land-linked, as part of China’s ambitious 5,500-km trans-Asia railway. This material link between Laos and China is further reinforced by an increasing number of scholarships awarded to students from Laos to study in China.

However, despite needing to achieve Chinese language proficiency at HSK-4 level for admission, many students from Laos still lack the Chinese proficiency needed to thrive in their subject learning.

To overcome these difficulties, many of them turn to Thai for their Chinese language learning. Sounds counterintuitive? Well, it is not.

To begin with, Thai is an easy language for Lao students because the two languages are mutually intelligible, there are only slight differences in the scripts of the two languages, and Thai media play a prominent role in Laos.

Second, there are many Chinese language learning resources for Thai speakers but few for Lao speakers.

Combine these two facts and it is obvious how Thai can facilitate Chinese language learning for students from Laos. Thai allows them to use translation apps to check the meaning of Chinese vocabulary, to use textbooks aimed at Thai learners of Chinese, and – the most popular option – to watch Chinese dramas with Thai subtitles.

Becoming a producer of Chinese-themed Thai language content

The story of Van is particularly impressive. Like many of her Lao peers, Van gave up her university study in Laos and came to China to seek a more profitable future. The aspiration of most international students from Laos is to return to Laos after their studies in China, and to find a steady job in a Chinese company there.

One of the main characters in Van’s Chinese-themed Thai-language novel

Van’s aspiration is different: she wants to become an entrepreneurial writer producing Chinese-themed novels for the Thai market.

Since she was very young, Van has loved reading Thai novels and watching Thai dramas. This also exposed her to many novels and dramas translated from Chinese into Thai, long before she even started to learn Chinese.

As her knowledge of Chinese language and culture has blossomed, she has started to write her own fiction. Van’s writing has strong elements of Chinese fantasy and romance but is written in Thai. The reason she has chosen Thai instead of Lao as the medium of her writing lies in the larger size of the Thai-language market and the greater technological sophistication of the Thai-medium online space.

Through her years of exposure to different transnational social media, Van today markets her writing on all major Thai-medium reading apps and has already gained a loyal following of over 2,000 Thai readers.

Chinese students learning Thai through Zhuang

Thai media content is not only attractive to youths from Laos but also those from China. It is particularly the Boys’ Love genre that is hugely popular. While negative attitudes towards same-sex relationships and queer identities persist in China, the opposite is true in Thailand. The Boys’ Love genre centers on romantic relationships between male characters. Thai media thus introduce Chinese youths to a broader range of gender and sexual identities and help to promote gender and sexual diversity. A good example for the popularity of the genre comes from the Boys’ Love actor Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, also known as Saint, who has over 1.1 million Chinese followers on Weibo,

A scene from “I told sunset about you” – its potential as a language learning resource is obvious

Ban, a Zhuang minority student from Funing, a border town in Yunnan between China and Vietnam, is one of those Chinese fans of Thai dramas. When she started to watch Thai dramas as a teenager out of curiosity for the “exotic” culture of Thailand, she was surprised to discover that the Thai language is quite similar to Zhuang.

This similarity – coupled with the informal exposure through her prolific drama watching – led her to quickly develop proficiency in Thai.

Her proficiency in Thai proved a huge asset when Ban graduated from university and could not find a job suited to her degree in business administration. It was her Thai that helped her secure a position and she now works as a business translator for an international company in Guangzhou.

Transnational Thai media

The popularity of Thai dramas in China has not been lost on Thai producers. Boys’ Love dramas increasingly include Chinese content to reach further into the huge and profitable Chinese market.

A student from the China-Laos Friendship Nongping Primary School on the Lane Xang EMU train of the China-Laos Railway (Source: Xinhuanet)

The drama “I Told Sunset about You” is a case in point. The plot centers on the romance between two boys preparing for university admission by taking Chinese language classes. The story is driven by their joint language learning focusing on key words all involving the Chinese word 心 (xin; “heart”).

This plot is not particularly far-fetched as the Chinese language has indeed become a commodity in Thailand that may help individuals to gain upward mobility in study and at work. Aspects of Thai culture and Chinese language meld to produce a new form of consumer product that may generate profit.

Strengthening transnational relationships

The opening of the Laos-China segment of the trans-Asian railroad constitutes a major milestone for transnational connections between China, Laos, Thailand, and, eventually, beyond. These connections are mostly seen in economic and geopolitical terms. The links that individuals build through linguistic and cultural consumption are too often overlooked.

The concept of language learning for academic or employment advance is no longer sufficient to understand young language learners’ learning experiences. The language desire that is evident in the research presented here deserves further attention to capture how young and marginalized people without much linguistic capital in valuable languages like English and Chinese might be included in the regional integration between China and ASEAN.

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

Last week I was privileged to attend the 3^rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular secondary school with a particular emphasis on the learning and teaching of German as an additional language. PASCH schools constitute a global network of more than 1,700 schools. ‘PASCH’ stands for ‘Schools – Partners of the Future.’ Funded by the German government, the PASCH network was initiated in 2008 in order to offer opportunities to youths from around the globe to learn German and to develop a positive relationship with modern Germany. PASCH supports professional development training for teachers, provides language learning resources for schools, offers scholarships for students to study in Germany, and numerous other virtual and non-virtual exchange and collaboration opportunities, including global student newspapers.

Attended by representatives of various national ministries of education, school principals, German language teachers, industry representatives and former students from across Southeast Asia and Australasia, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of the state of the art of language education in the region.

Most language teaching efforts across the region are, unsurprisingly, devoted to English. However, there is a clear sense that English is no longer enough. To begin with, the countries of the region are characterized by enormous linguistic diversity and mother tongue education in addition to instruction in the national language is increasingly incorporated into curricula.

Second, with the greater regional integration that the introduction of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 promises neighbouring languages are gaining in importance. While as yet weakly integrated in most curricula, their role is set to expand.

Finally, there are other international languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. Offering the latter in the curriculum is often a niche effort of schools who are trying to differentiate themselves from other schools and who are attempting to provide their students with an additional edge. That teaching international languages other than English is intended to create a small elite group of cultural mediators is best illustrated with the example of Singapore. There, the opportunity to study a third foreign language is offered to students who achieve in the top ten percent in the primary school leaving certificate. Only these top academic achievers are able to pursue a third language in high school by attending a Ministry of Education Language Centre (MOELC) in addition to their regular studies. The languages on offer include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Japanese, Malay and Spanish.

While German may seem like a relatively irrelevant language to pursue in Southeast Asia, this is in fact not true for students at PASCH schools. These highly motivated students do so with two main goals in mind: to pursue tertiary education at a university in Germany and/or to pursue employment with a German company. Speakers at the conference included a number of students who had achieved their goal and who spoke about their experiences of learning German in school, participating in exchange programs, studying at a German university and working in a role where their German skills are advantageous.

In addition to achieving personal aims, fostering German skills among a small group of cultural mediators also benefits the wider society, as speakers from various national ministries of education stressed. These benefits are related particularly to knowledge transfer. Interesting examples include partnerships with German companies to deliver an innovative automotive engineering program in a Malaysian college or partnerships between Singaporean polytechnics and German small-to-medium enterprises to deliver a dual vocational training program. In fact, attending industry representatives stressed the importance of combining language skills with strong academic and vocational skills for success in the global workplace.

Finally, a number of school representatives argued that a focus on German had improved overall language education in their school. A teacher from an Australian high school, for instance, mentioned that – in the context of Australia’s notorious ‘monolingual mindset’ – his school’s focus on German has had positive effects on language learning more generally. As students in the German immersion program have discovered the value of learning German, their desire to learn another language has also increased and the school has unexpectedly seen enrolments in its Japanese language program rise, too.

In Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the positive side-effects of a school’s focus on German are different and relate to improved teacher quality. Speakers from these countries explained that teacher quality – both in terms of proficiency and pedagogy – was a concern. This affects predominantly English language teachers, as English is the most widely taught language. Participating in the professional development opportunities offered by the PASCH school program has helped to disseminate pedagogy training across languages and thus has resulted in improving the professionalism of English language teachers, too.

Despite their diverse backgrounds all speakers stressed that the problems facing humanity today are global problems and that the world needs to move beyond competition to become an international learning community. Linguistic diversity will inevitably mediate the success of our partnerships for the future.

Burmese newspaper in a Bangkok restaurant

They say, ‘Aaaah, Pamma (Thai word for ‘Burmese’)…. You don’t look Myanmar!’ Obviously, they think all Burmese are poor migrants. I stopped telling them I’m from Burma. They react nicely if I say I’m from Singapore.

Thiri’s experience is part of the narrative of the intensifying internationalisation of higher education in Thailand. Since the 1990s, Thailand has been driven to internationalise its higher education as part of its economic expansion effort in order to generate income (Lavankura, 2013). As a result, the number of international programs offered by Thai universities steadily increased from 14 programs in 1984, to 520 in 2003, and to 981 in 2010.

English as the medium of instruction is the key characteristic of these international programs (see Piller and Cho, 2013). Pad Lavankura (2013, p. 670) from Ramkhamhaeng University explains that “the extra demand for international programs is based on a growing need for graduates competent in the English language, in addition to being competent in their own discipline”. Similar to other Southeast and East Asian countries, Thailand enthusiastically embraces the discourse of English as capital to elevate its standing in the global economic and academic system. Against the background of Thailand’s poor record in English language proficiency (ranked 53 out of 54 countries; English First, 2012), and in thrall to the glamorous global status of the language, English MoI international programs have become an attractive option among middle- and upper-class Thais desiring to improve their social status and access to better employment.

While the majority of students enrolled in the international programs are Thai nationals, the number of international students has seen a steady increase. Lavankura (2013, p. 666) observes that ‘the ambition to “catch up with the West” continues, but the idea has been expanded to include other geographical parts of the world, especially the ASEAN countries”. According to the Office of the Higher Education Commission (2013), the total of international students enrolled in higher education in 2010-2011 was 20,309, and the highest number of international students came from China (8,444), followed by Myanmar (1,481), Laos (1, 344) and Vietnam (1,290).

Foreign Students in Thai Higher Education Institutions 2011

Indeed, many of my students are international students, mainly from other parts of Asia such as China, Myanmar, South Korea and Taiwan. Many of them opted out of going to an expensive English-speaking country and chose Thailand instead as a study overseas destination for affordable tuition fees, geographical proximity to their home country, friendliness of Thai people and wonderful local food.

Two students in my course told me eagerly that they have much more opportunity to use English here than they had in their home countries of China and South Korea. As a result, their confidence in their English has increased since they arrived in Bangkok. Few of them have learnt much Thai, but that has not caused much discomfort or inconvenience, and in fact, they say they are often admired by local Thais for their fluency in English, and their national identity as Chinese and South Korean has a strong currency in Thailand.

This positive reception by locals and their instant admiration for English-speaking Asians is rare in the narratives of the Burmese international students I’ve met to date. In fact, the opposite is true as demonstrated by Thiri’s experience. Another story comes from Tom, a young Burmese MBA student. Tom and his Thai-speaking Burmese friend were shopping in a watch shop one day. Tom asked several questions in English to a smiling Thai shopkeeper, who eventually asked him where he was from:

I said I was from Myanmar, and he said ‘Oh… Pamma…’ and quickly turned to other shopkeepers and start talking amongst themselves. My friend can understand Thai and said, ‘they are saying you won’t be buying anything because you are poor. They are surprised that a man from a poor country can speak English.’ I was so sad.

It is not only the public space where the stigmatisation of Burma impacts their everyday lives as international students. Speaking to several Burmese students enrolled in international programs at universities across Bangkok, I have learned that they have experiences of being excluded from classroom activities, of being called names, and of being ridiculed for their perceived naivety and accent in English on campus. As a result, there is a tendency to study and socialise among themselves. This obviously reduces access to interactional opportunities in English as a lingua franca, and they are well aware that such socialisation is counterproductive. Commonly, however, many of them have been able to form close friendship with their fellow international students, who share their goals of gaining more proficiency in English and more international experience.

‘With the introduction of the “Global 30” Project, the best universities in Japan are now offering degree programs in English’

My observations in this post are based on anecdotes that I have been collecting informally since I arrived in Thailand in 2011. The problem I see is that their complex experience of study overseas in English as a lingua franca in a (so-called) non-English speaking Asian country remains largely invisible in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication and related areas, as the research focus to date has been concentrated on fee-paying Asian students studying in English-speaking Western countries.

As demonstrated by Ingrid Piller and Jinhyun Cho (2013) in the case of internationalisation of higher education in South Korea, and as further exemplified by Japan’s ambition to internationalise its higher education and by Thailand’s declaration of their plan to become a regional education hub, universities in Asia are en route to attracting Asian international students to their English MoI international programs.

The commodification of internationalisation of higher education within English-crazy Asia is a relatively new ball game in the name of globalisation. How do we make sense of this and its impact? One possible way is to start documenting challenges and issues faced by this emerging student population, like those experienced by the Burmese students discussed in this post. Such research efforts must look closely into the historical tensions among nations and ethnic groups and their impact on everyday negotiations of identity, access to interactional opportunities and a sense of belonging on and off campus.

Piller, I. & J. Cho (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society , 42 (1), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

Lavankura, P. (2013). Internationalizing Higher Education in Thailand: Government and University Responses. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17 (5), 663-676 DOI: 10.1177/1028315313478193

ライター:高橋君江(Kimie Takahashi) | 翻訳: 貝和慧美 (Emi Kaiwa)

バンコクの憂鬱

「タイ人から出身地を聞かれた時は、『フィリピン、それかシンガポールから来ました。』って答えるようにしてるんです。そうすると、嫌な顔されないですみますから！」最近出会った経営学を学ぶ若いミャンマー人女子留学生が、バンコクでの暮らしぶりを教えてくれた。タイ語があまり話せないティリさん（本掲載内、登場人物は全て匿名）は、バンコクでの生活は英語でこなしている。アジア人なのに流暢な英語を話すという事に驚かれ、売店のタイ人に出身地がどこなのか聞かれる事が多いという。「どこから来たの？」という質問には慣れたが、その答えに対してのタイ人の反応は未だに悩みの種だ。

「『あぁ、パーマ（タイ語でミャンマー人の意）．．．、ミャンマー人みたいに見えないね！』って言われるんです。明らかに、タイ人は、すべてのミャンマー人が貧しい移民民族だと考えているんです。だから、もうミャンマー出身だって言わないんです。シンガポールから来たと言うと、優しくしてもらえますから。」

ティリさんの経験の背景には、タイ王国（以下、タイ）で過熱する高等教育の国際化への取り組みがある。1990年代以降、タイは、収入を増やす為の景気拡大の一環として高等教育国際化を推進してきた（Lavankura, 2013）。その結果、タイの大学におけるインターナショナルプログラムは増加し、1984年には14だったプログラム数が、2003年に520へ、そして2010年には981にも上った。

これらのインターナショナルプログラムの重要な特徴は指導言語が英語であることだ。（Piller and Cho, 2013参照）。ラムカムヘン大学のパッド・ラバンクラ（Lavankura, 2013、p.670）は、「大学の卒業生に専門分野における能力だけでなく、高い英語力が求められている現状が、インターナショナルプログラムへの需要増加の根底にある。」と述べている。他のアジア諸国と同様に、タイは経済と学問をグローバルレベルに高めていくための資本として英語を取り入れている。英語能力が低いとされているタイ人（54か国中53位；English First, 2012）にとって、グローバルステイタスである英語が出来る事への憧れは強まる一方だ。よって、英語で学べるインターナショナルプログラムは、高い社会的地位やより良い仕事に就きたいと考えている中流、上流階級のタイ人の間で魅力的な選択肢として注目を集め始めている。

タイ王国の高等教育機関で学ぶ留学生2013年盤

インターナショナルプログラムに入学している生徒の大多数がタイ人である一方、留学生の数も増え続けている。ラムカムヘン大学のパッド・ラバンクラ (2013, p. 666) は、「『西洋に追いつけ』という強い風潮はこれからも続くが、この考え方は、他の地域、特にASEAN諸国へと拡大している」との見解を示している。高等教育事務局（2013）によると、2010年～2011年の間にタイの大学へ入学した留学生数の合計は20,309名で、留学者数の多い国は順に、中国（8,444名）、ミャンマー（1,481名）、ラオス（1,344名）、ベトナム（1,290名）となっている。

確かに、私の学生の多くは留学生で、主に中国、ミャンマー、韓国、そして台湾などの他のアジア地域から来ている。彼らの多くは、費用のかさむ英語圏の国には行かずに、学費を賄う事ができ、地理的にも母国と近く、友好的な国民性があり、且つ食事のおいしいタイを留学先として選ぶ。

私の授業を受けている中国人と韓国人の生徒は、タイにいる方が母国にいた時よりも英語に触れる機会がとても多いと言う。その結果、バンコクに着て以降、彼らの英語力に対する自信は高まっている。タイ語ができなくとも生活に不便を感じる事は少なく、実際には、英語を話す方がタイ人に賞賛されるという。そして、彼らの国籍はタイで強い価値をもつ中国と韓国だ。

このようにタイ人から好意的に歓迎されたり、英語を話すアジア人として瞬時に賞賛されることは、私が今まで出会ったミャンマー人留学生の体験の中ではほぼ皆無である。ティリさんの体験のように、逆のケースの方が多いのだ。ミャンマー人の若いＭＢＡ学生のトムさんがいい例である。ある日、トムさんとタイ語が話せるミャンマー人の友人で時計店で買い物をしていた時の出来事だった。トムさんは、タイ語があまり話せないので、英語でタイ人店員に質問していたところ、「どこから来たのですか？」と尋ねられた。

「ミャンマーから来たと答えました。そしたら店員が、『あ、パーマ』と言うと、すぐに他の店員の方を向き、自分たちだけで話し始めました。僕の友人はタイ語がわかるので、通訳してくれたのですが、『彼らは、君がミャンマー出身で貧しいから、何も買うはずがない、と言っている。貧しい国出身なのに君が英語を話せる事に驚いているよ。』と。とても悲しい想いをしました。」

ミャンマー人留学生として生活する上での問題は、公共の場所だけに限らない。バンコクにある数々の大学のインターナショナルプログラムに入学したミャンマー人留学生達と話す中で、キャンパス内でも、クラスの諸活動から仲間はずれにされたり、嫌な名前で呼ばれたり、ナイーブさや英語のアクセントなどを馬鹿にされるなどの経験があるという事がわかった。その為、ミャンマー人学生は固まって行動する傾向にある。その結果、インターナショナルプログラムで学ぶ学生間の共通語である英語を使う機会が減る事になってしまい、彼ら自身、この様なミャンマー人同士だけのコミュニティー形成は逆効果である事に気づいている。ただその一方で、他国からの留学生と友人関係を築いているミャンマー人学生も多く、英語力を高めたり、より国際的な経験を得ていることも事実だ。

グローバル30プロジェクトの始動に伴い、今、日本の一流大学が英語での学位取得プログラムを開始している。

この記事で述べた私の見解は、2011年の来タイ以降、非公式に収集してきた逸話に基づいている。課題と思われるのは、応用言語学や異文化コミュニケーションなどの分野では、研究対象が西洋の英語圏におけるアジア人自費留学生に集中しており、（俗にいう）アジアにおける非英語圏に留学して英語を共通語として学んでいる学生たちの複雑な経験があまり研究されていないことである。

アジアの大学は今、英語インターナショナルプログラムによるアジア人留学生獲得に本腰を入れつつある。イングリッド・ピラー及びジンヒュン・チョウ (2013)が検証した韓国における高等教育の国際化、日本の高等教育国際化への取り組み、さらにアジアの地域教育のハブ国を目指すタイの計画がその良い例である。

英語崇拝のアジア、この地域における高等教育の商品化は、グローバリゼーションという名の下に始まったばかりだ。今後、アジアにおける高等教育の国際化・商品化とその影響をどのように理解していけばよいのだろうか？一つの方法は、上述したミャンマー人学生の話のような、留学生が直面している問題等を調査していく事である。その様な研究は、国家間・民族間の歴史的な問題とそれらが学生たちの日常生活において、どのようにアイデンティティーの形成、人との係わり合いの機会、キャンパス内外での帰属意識に影響を与えているかなどに注目する必要があるだろう。

Piller, I. & J. Cho (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society , 42 (1), 23-44.
Lavankura, P. (2013). Internationalizing Higher Education in Thailand: Government and University Responses. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17 (5), 663-676.

Mariko Watanabe and Ingrid Piller celebrate their reunion at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

This post is also available in pdf-format. Click here.

In early July, YM Fashion’s CEO Mariko Watanabe flew in from Tokyo to Bangkok. She was scheduled to meet Ingrid Piller, who, on the way back from the Middle East to Australia, also just arrived in Bangkok to deliver a plenary speech at the H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand at Assumption University.

Mariko and Ingrid first met in Tokyo back in 2010 when YM Fashion Co., Ltd. became an official supporter of Language on the Move. Collaboration between the fashion industry and academics is unique, originating from the company’s increasing interest in the role of language and communication in their global business operation.

The day after the Forum, the CEO and the sociolinguist celebrated the success of the event in Chit Lom, one of Bangkok’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. Their conversation soon turned to YM Fashion’s first overseas venture in Thailand, which began some 26 years ago and was a trail-blazing endeavour in Japanese-Thai joint ventures.

In 2012, Thailand overtook the US for the first time and ranked second, after China, as the most desired destination for international joint ventures by Japanese companies (Japan External Trade Organization, 2013). At the time of Mariko’s first visit in the 1980s, however, the situation was quite different and only a handful of large-sized Japanese companies had manufacturing operations in Thailand. Mariko says “Bangkok back then was a small touristy city without much of its skyscrapers, glamorous shopping centers and the Skytrains. During the rainy season, it once took us three days by taxi to get to the airport.”

Japanese Business on the Move

The survey points at an assumption that has long been present in the minds of the Japanese – to succeed overseas you need English. In the context of global business, the Japanese language is often considered as useless because, in the mentality of many Japanese companies, it is assumed to be only spoken by the Japanese in Japan. The trajectory of Mariko’s company in Thailand, however, is a story that not only challenges this myth but also highlights the importance of setting aside pre-conceptions about linguistic deficits and of embracing cultural and linguistic diversity.

Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

Mariko established YM Fashion in Tokyo in 1979 with her husband Isamu Watanabe and their long-time friend Yasuko Hayata. Ten years later, YM Fashion International Thailand was set up in 1990 with a young Thai partner. At the time of the launch of their business in Bangkok, none of the founders or their staff spoke English or Thai on a functional level. How did a Japanese medium-sized fashion retail company manage to find a local contact, secure a partnership, hire and train employees, and grow to operate a 7,000sqm factory with 400 employees and 10 retail shops in central Bangkok today? Mariko explains that the opportunity to expand YM Fashion and develop its trademark brand Yaccomaricard in Thailand originally came through an informal international network of hippies in the late 1980s. And their story in Thailand is a story of languages on the move, beginning with a business proposal from unlikely collaborators.

Hippie Connections

Back in the 1980s in Tokyo, two German internationalists, Guy and Helga Pachet, were producing European-style baby clothes at home. After a long trip around the world in the 60s and the 70s, the couple had settled in Tokyo where their first baby was born. As their home-made European children’s clothes gained popularity in their local area, they wanted to commercialise their production. They turned to their friend Mariko to explore collaborative business opportunities.

Mariko initially turned down their proposal. Communication was a problem. Guy spoke German, French and English but had very little Japanese at the time. Mariko and her staff couldn’t speak English, let alone German or French.

Mariko: “I didn’t think it would be possible to work together if they couldn’t speak Japanese. I asked him to learn Japanese first. I promised that, in the meantime, we would try to learn English. But he learned Japanese better and faster than I ever learned English [laughs].”

As Guy quickly taught himself Japanese, the couple and YM Fashion began collaborating, and soon their new brand, Annya and Besna, became a hit among fashion-conscious mothers in the upmarket town of Denenchofu, Tokyo. As sales increased, the need to secure a production site devoted to Annya and Besna emerged. The couple decided to turn to their old hippie connections in Bangkok, Thailand.

Passion for Success

From left: Mariko Watanabe, Helga and Guy Pachet, and Punsuri Revirava in Yawara, Bangkok, 1989

In 1989, the Pachets and Mariko flew to Bangkok to meet Punsuri Revirava, whom they knew from their travels during their hippie years. The three parties, the Pachets, YM Fashion and Punsuri, co-founded a company, Clair Moda. Punsuri, who is Chinese-Thai, provided a manufacturing site within her family-owned shop house and initially secured six seamstresses for the production. Mariko was responsible for teaching the six young Thai women how to sew and produce clothes that would satisfy the desires and tastes of highly discerning Japanese consumers. She recalls that in terms of language, training the Thai workers was not a problem.

Mariko: “I couldn’t speak Thai, and these girls are from rural areas in Thailand, so they could speak neither English nor Japanese. Basically I taught these girls everything by using Japanese and through body language. These women still work for us today, and 26 years on at our factory, they have become leaders and teach apprentices how to sew using Japanese technical terms.”

A year later, YM Fashion bought out Clair Moda in order to set up YM Fashion International Thailand. That was also when they invited a young Thai woman, Ichaya Khamala, to come on board as co-owner and CEO. Under Thai business law, a foreign company must have a Thai partner who maintains a significant share in the company. While majoring in Business Studies with a minor in Japanese at Thammasat University, Ichaya had worked as a part-time interpreter for Mariko in the previous year. 22-year-old Ichaya had limited work experience and no experience whatsoever in running a company. Mariko recalls that it was unheard of for a Japanese company to partner with a fresh university graduate, and a woman to boot. However, she had no hesitation:

Mariko: “What she had instead of experience was language proficiencies in Thai, Japanese and English and a passion for business success in her country on the verge of an economic boom. She had so much passion and desire to learn and grow with us.”

As their collaboration began, Mariko taught Ichaya everything she knew about production and business management, and for all these years, Japanese has remained the language of their transnational partnership. From the beginning, Mariko not only instructed Ichaya how to do business, but also helped her improve her spoken and written Japanese.

At the same time, all the YM Fashion employees who have been transferred from Japan to Thailand to oversee the production are required to undertake a three-month intensive course in Thai immediately upon their arrival. As Mariko explains: “How can Japanese managers win the heart of their Thai workers if they can’t speak Thai?”

Global Expansion and Family

The day before the Forum: Sei and Mariko Watanabe select outfits for Ingrid’s keynote speech at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

On her trip to Bangkok this time, Mariko was accompanied by her daughter, Sei Watanabe. Together with her younger brother Kari, Sei established YM Fashion UK in 1997 and managed the operation until her return to Japan in 2012. The siblings will take over YM Fashion in Japan in the near future as Mariko and Isamu ready themselves for retirement. As the mother of a young girl herself, Ingrid asked Mariko how she had managed to raise her children while building a successful fashion company and expanding overseas.

Mariko explained that she always took her children along on her business trips, letting them directly experience culture and language of other countries so that they would develop a deep appreciation for diversity. It was also important for Mariko and Isamu to raise their children multilingually:

Mariko: “After the war, we wanted to study English, but English education in Japan was really inadequate at that time. Early on in our overseas ventures, we did everything we could to succeed without English, but we always thought that our children must learn English AND other important languages to thrive even more in the 21^st century.”

Starting with English as a second language, their children went on to also learn French and Thai. While making sure their children learnt English is unsurprising, the insistence on French and Thai, too, is unusual. Mariko argues that French is the language of global fashion and continues to be important in international business negotiations and Thai is the language of their close partner and first overseas expansion.

Not only did Mariko work to instil an appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity in her own children but she’s also committed to ensure that the children of production workers have similar opportunities. The nursery school that is located within the Thai production site, was established to cater for the young children of workers. The nursery teaches not only Thai but also English and the library provides children’s books in different languages.

Over her long career Mariko has remained a passionate internationalist: “We live in Japan, we live in Asia and we live in the world. Our perspective is global.” She never let herself be held back by the limited opportunities available to women of her generation: where she lacked language resources, she responded with flexibility by drawing on Japanese, her passion for fashion, her commitment to capacity building in Thailand and the common humanity that binds us all.

Carrying on the legacy of the pioneering founders, the next generation of YM Fashion – Sei, Kari and Ichaya – are equipped not only with many more language resources, but also an appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of the 21^st century business world in which they operate.

____

MARIKO WATANABE | Founder and CEO of YM Fashion Co., Ltd, Japan

Mariko Watanabe

Mariko was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938. Having studied at the Kuwasawa Design Institute in 1957, Mariko worked as a freelance buyer, importing second-hand clothes to Japan, and later opened a vintage European clothes shop in Keio Limone Harajuku in 1975.

Mariko launched a new women’s brand, Yaccomaricard, with Yasuko Hayata and Isamu Watanabe in 1977 and established YM Fashion Co., Ltd. in 1979.

Having celebrated its 35^th anniversary in 2012, YM Fashion today has 24 direct shops and 120 wholesale shops in Japan, 11 direct shops in the UK and Thailand, and 42 wholesale shops in Europe and the US.

 

Khun Yuvadee acknowledged the fact that although many tourism service providers face language- and communication-related challenges in catering for international tourists in Thailand, there has been little academic research that addresses this issue in any depth. She raised the example of the Japanese market. While Japanese tourists are considered as a ‘good market’ in Thailand, they often expect to be catered for in Japanese, and the shortage of Japanese-speaking Thai tourism-workers has resulted in difficulties in satisfying client needs and desires during their stay. These are, however, anecdotes, and there is a need for further research that will explore a shortage of workers with Japanese language skills and its implications for Thai tourism.

From left: Nareerat Vanapirome, Khun Yuvadee Nirattakun (TAT) and Kimie Takahashi

Another challenge Khun Yuvadee raised as a growing issue in Thailand is the rapid growth of the Chinese market. Thanks to the 2012 megahit movie “Lost in Thailand”, Thailand has seen an unprecedented tourism boom among Chinese holiday makers, reaching 2.5 million visitors last year. While the boom is an enviable success, it has also created a number of challenges, particularly to the tourism service providers in smaller tourism destinations such as Chiang Mai, where the movie was filmed. This popular rural destination is struggling to supply accommodation, transportation, professional (and bilingual) workers and language support for millions of Chinese tourists who usually arrive in large groups.

Khun Yuvadee also alerted us to TAT’s latest research that shows that while spa is one of the most popular tourist activities, international tourists find it difficult to communicate with spa technicians. However, how and when these difficulties arise and with whom, and the consequences of them for the tourists, the workers, the enterprises and Thai tourism more broadly remain unexplored. Taking their research as a starting point, we are set to collect data from spa businesses in Bangkok as part of the project.

The research team thanks Khun Yuvadee for her generous support and looks forward to collaborating with TAT on the Thailand-on-the-Move project.

Sociolinguistics of Amazing Thailand launched

The Language-on-the-Move team is proud to announce the launch of a new sociolinguistic research project entitled “Language, Mobility and Tourism: Thailand on the Move towards ASEAN 2015”. Funded by Assumption University of Thailand and led by Kimie Takahashi, the project explores the role of language learning and multilingualism in tourism-related workplaces in Bangkok. It is modeled on the language and tourism projects conducted by Ingrid Piller in Switzerland (with Alexandre Duchêne) and Australia (with Kimie Takahashi). The interactive project site is hosted by Language on the Move.

Starting in March 2013, the research team will interview and conduct fieldwork with up to 30 workers in a range of tourism-related industries (e.g., hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, spa and beauty businesses). They will also seek to collect comments from experts and officials in tourism-related organisations (e.g., Tourism Authority of Thailand, the Thai Hotel Association, the Ministry of Tourism and Sports). Key questions that will be addressed in this project include:

1. What kinds of linguistic challenges is Thai tourism facing in catering for international visitors?
2. What types of language resources are available and needed in Thai tourism?
3. Is there any relationship between language proficiency and mobility of workers in tourism?
4. As a holiday destination, how is Thailand represented globally?

As part of the project, Ingrid has been invited to visit Assumption University in July to jointly conduct a two-day workshop with the research team. The workshop will be designed to highlight the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding tourism and language issues inherent in the industry. More information will be available at the project site shortly. Throughout the life of the project (March 2013 – August 2014), updates about data collection and collaboration with partners will be made regularly on its interactive website and through Facebook and Twitter.

“Imported Teacher”, the British Council’s new campaign in Thailand

As a language educator in Thailand my in-box is always full of invitations to conferences devoted to ASEAN and English language teaching. At such conferences, keynote speakers from the UK or the US make similar, if not identical, arguments for the importance of English as a lingua franca in the linguistically diverse ASEAN region. Their trump card is normally the economic value of English.

For example, at a seminar I attended recently in Bangkok, an American TESOL celebrity told an audience of Thai English teachers that: “English-speakers earn THREE times more than non-English speakers” [capitalization original to her Powerpoint slide]. This was a fact, she assured us, by referring to a report about English in the Middle East and North Africa. Commissioned by the British Council, the report claims that English-speaking receptionists in a city such as Bagdad in Iraq can earn three times more than their non-English-speaking counterparts. It’s impossible to determine the sample size but the results are based on 50 job ads for all kinds of professions. Only receptionists have a three-fold earning differential. To generalize on the basis of a handful of job ads for receptionists in Baghdad to a global assertion is, well, problematic, to put it mildly …

Propaganda such as this result in a single-minded wave of English fever. Of course, this is not unique to Thailand – Japan, South Korea and many other Asian nations also have their hearts set firmly for English. But it is important to ask ourselves if such a narrowly focused belief in the power of English – based as it is on questionable data and assumptions – is a good thing for Thailand and for its ASEAN project. The reality of ASEAN nations today are the ever-increasing flows of people and businesses from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds; in such a fluid transnational space, chances are that languages other than English are more useful or more realistic choices.

Let me illustrate this point by an example of a major Japanese company in Thailand. This company is considering providing English lessons for their Thai drivers, whose job it is to drive expat Japanese employees and their families stationed in Bangkok. Most of these Thai drivers speak poor English. As many of the Japanese employees and their families themselves have limited English proficiency, communication between the two parties is rather constrained.

A Japanese expat wife, whose husband works for this company, told me that she was scared of asking the driver to drive her and her children to their school in the morning. Because they don’t have a language in common, a number of failed communications have led to mistrust between them. Funded by her husband’s company, she’s learning English at a school in Bangkok, but with only a one-hour lesson per week she’s making little progress. Frustrated, her family’s decision to solve this problem with the driver was rather unique – they moved next to their children’s school.

The ideology of English as ‘useful’ is obviously implicit in the company’s consideration of providing English lessons for their drivers. It seems to keep the company from considering a more efficient option: teaching Japanese to the Thai drivers and Thai to the Japanese expats. In addition to such lessons where they can learn basics, both groups will get many daily practice opportunities with each other.

Increasing numbers of Japanese restaurants are opening in Bangkok

Despite last year’s flooding that affected over 450 Japanese companies in Thailand, more Japanese companies are planning to launch their business here. According to Teikoku Data Bank (2011), 3,133 Japanese companies are registered in Thailand, and approximately 37,000 expats (plus approx. 13,000 non-company worker Japanese) are sent from Japan to work in this country. According to some Japanese expats and business owners I’ve met, they need not English-speaking but Japanese-speaking Thais or Japanese-Thai translators. While they also pay lip-service to the importance of English and are often forced to use English, they would actually prefer to use Japanese in business negotiations and feel much more at ease in the presence of Japanese-speaking Thai interpreters. According to one consulting company, the demand for Thai-Japanese interpreters is on the rise. However, they are difficult to find. Actually, Japanese-Thai interpreters can easily earn much higher salaries than English-Thai interpreters!

For instance, a newly opened Japanese restaurant hired a Japanese-speaking Thai waiter and his starting salary is 40,000 baht – four times more than his non-Japanese speaking co-workers, twice as much as that of my English-speaking Thai friend working for an international education firm in Bangkok, and close to that of a foreign lecturer with a PhD at a reputable university in Bangkok.

Furthermore, one Japanese expat working for a major Japanese company told me that English is often not the preferred choice of language among their increasing number of Korean and Chinese clients operating in Thailand. For instance, a Japanese expat, Ken, whom I met recently, had a meeting with a Korean expat businessman in Bangkok. Ken began his meeting by greeting in Korean (Ken is Japan-born Korean with basic Korean proficiency) and mostly used Thai and sometimes English during the meeting as his Korean client speaks good Thai but cannot speak English. He had a Thai secretary who translated Ken’s ‘no-so-perfect Thai’ into ‘proper’ Thai to her Thai-speaking Korean boss.

For Thailand to be competitive in ASEAN and the global economy, English will continue to be of importance, of course. However, it seems short-sighted and dangerous to ignore other languages. As Thailand prepares for the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 and as it strives to attract foreign investments from ASEAN Plus Three nations Japan, China and South Korea, the importance of a workforce that speaks their languages is paramount.

The need for more diverse language education and its link to employment needs to be based on empirical research evidence of the emerging language needs of international employers actually operating in Thailand in order to achieve positive policy change. Currently, this evidence doesn’t exist – a blind spot created by the relentless propaganda for English.

Underneath the zipped Asian face a Western face emerges: an English school’s ad in Bangkok (unrelated to the school in the blog post). Photo by Olan Sawangnuwatkul

Thailand is seeing an unprecedented English language learning hype. This hype, of course, is nothing but a closely engineered social phenomenon. It’s been promoted by various organisations and companies which claim that for Thailand to become more competitive as the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 approaches, Thais must learn English. That’s why learning English is a good investment for Thais, says Michel le Quellec, President of Wall Street English (Thailand), the local franchisee of the UK-based Wall Street Institute. He assures us of the benefits of learning English:

Investing in English proficiency has an attractive return and is affordable, as they can expect a 15-20 per cent salary hike after finishing our course, or an extra Bt1 million after six years.

While it’s hard to know where Quellec’s conviction comes from, everyone involved in the business of ELT seems to be on his side. They believe that English is inevitable for Thailand and it is a career booster for Thais, but everyone also seems to think that the Thais are excruciatingly bad at learning English. It is at this point where we arrive at the inevitable question – who is to blame?

At conferences, in corridors at universities and in cyberspace, all fingers seem firmly pointed at the teachers: both Thai and foreign. For many critics including Quellec, “[T]he problem for Thailand is that there aren’t enough qualified teachers, while most teaching methods here are inefficient…” The majority of Thai teachers teaching at public schools are reportedly either underqualified or inexperienced, while most foreign teachers hired in public and private schools are shunned as unqualified and uncommitted.

A string of plans to rectify this grim situation are well under way. The Ministry of Education kicked off this year by appointing former British prime minister Tony Blair as the model English teacher and ambassador of Thailand’s Year 2012 English Speaking Program. This was followed by the proposal of increased salary for new English teachers with a university degree, and the announcement of the 100 million-baht budget to send 1,100 Thai teachers to English speaking countries for a training program during the summer vacation. Last week the Thai government working with the British Council brought more than 100 volunteers from the UK to Thailand, who will be teaching English in some 100 schools for six weeks.

In light of this engineered ELL hype and the alleged shortage of qualified Thai and foreign teachers, my friend’s experience in job hunting in Bangkok makes an intriguing story.

Originally from mainland China, Emily (pseudonym) was enrolled in a TESOL masters’ program at a university in Bangkok. To improve her CV, she applied for an English teaching position at a large franchise language school near her university. After a short job interview, a Thai interviewer declared that Emily wasn’t good enough – racially, that was.

“We can’t offer you a job because you are not white.”

Emily was taken aback, but she patiently explained that no, she’s not white, but she has two years of English teaching experience in another province and was studying an MA TESOL. Her persistence paid off and Emily was led to the principal’s office for further interview.

Indeed the Thai principal was impressed with Emily’s English. But this didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t white.

“It’s a shame! Your English is great, but you are not from a Western background. You are not white, you see. Why don’t you teach Chinese at our school? You can start immediately.”

For Emily, the principal’s offer wasn’t a good deal. To begin with, she had no experience or interest in teaching Chinese. She had no official qualification, either. What’s more, the principal asked her to use English to teach Chinese – for the school, she was capable of teaching Chinese, its complex language system and associated culture in English, but she wasn’t good enough to teach English itself. Most unfair of all, she was to teach Chinese in English for one third of the salary that English teachers were paid at the school.

It is obvious that race (being white) or the country of origin (US, UK, Australia, i.e., ‘West’) is not a qualification. Yet, the two categories remain entrenched as the primary criteria for hiring an English language teachers, while actual qualifications or work experience are secondary, if not irrelevant in the current ELT job market in Thailand. The national projects as well as the local hiring practice here are part and parcel of the global TESOL industry which is undergirded by race. What’s the point of believing in English as a global language or ELT as a profession if their race automatically renders Asians as second best?

Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train ride from central Bangkok. The special shuttle bus waiting at the station for bargain hunters was full of Japanese JT fans, and I struck up a conversation with an elderly Japanese couple. As they looked ‘non-tourist’ and at ease with the surroundings, I first thought that they were retirees living in Thailand. It turned out that they were actually tourists, and the main aim of their trip was to stay at the newly-opened prestigious Okura Hotel. They were enjoying the hotel, but “we actually prefer the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We stay there every time we come to Thailand”. Curious about “every time”, I asked how many times they’d visited. They looked unsure, replying “We’ve lost count…”. Finally, they figured that, since their first trip some 20 years ago, the husband, a retired real estate sales manager, had visited about 30 times, and his wife, a retired bank worker, over 40 times!

Seeing my disbelief, Mrs. Tanaka (pseudonym) enthusiastically explained how easy and pleasurable each of their visits had been. They quickly added that neither of them could speak English or Thai, but they have never had a serious problem or unpleasant experience. They love Thai culture and for Mrs. Tanaka, “Bangkok has become home”. Before we parted, they also talked about their wish to move to Thailand permanently, but that would happen, they explained, only after they had fully fulfilled their duty to farewell Mr. Tanaka’s elderly mother, who is 100 years old.

Although they claimed that they can’t speak any English, it’s probably the case that they can communicate in English to some extent. After all, they were able to get to the sales venue by themselves by using the BTS Skytrain where information signs are mostly in Thai and English. At the same time, their multiple trips to Thailand and their sense of belonging to the country despite their claimed lack of English or the local language, challenge the discourse of トラベル/旅行英会話 (English for Travel Purposes), a multimillion-dollar branch of the huge English teaching industry in Japan.

Compared to English for Academic Purposes, the king of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Travel Purposes (ETP) has received less scholarly attention. But ETP provides an amazing variety of courses and materials and has a strong hold on the psyche of many Japanese. What we find in cyberspace, for example, are countless numbers of ETP-related publications, websites of private language schools, vocational schools and universities that offer ETP courses, free and paid online lessons, seminars conducted by major travel agencies, websites run by travel English experts and enthusiasts, etc. Many 英会話学校 (English conversation schools) such as the three major schools, AEON, ECC and Gaba, offer ETP courses, and the discourse in the ads of these three schools is strikingly similar: ETP courses are for people who wish to make their overseas trip more enjoyable.

Gaba, for instance, recommends their ETP course for those who desire to (1) travel alone, (2) travel without guidebooks and (3) communicate with local people. Furthermore, ECC teacher Mika Fukube explains that ‘good English’ rather than ‘broken English’ will get tourists better service overseas:

海外旅行先でのホテルやレストランなどではブロークンな英語ではなく、しっかりとした英会話を話すことで、より良いサービスが提供されます.  (If you can communicate in proper English, not in broken English, you will be able to receive good service at hotels and restaurants in your destination.) [my translation]

Then, how much and how long does a tourist need to invest in getting that better, service-winning English? AEON offers a one-year ETP course and charges JPY118,440 for a weekly group lesson (plus the registration fee of JPY 30,000 and possibly extra for textbooks), while Gaba’s one-on-one course over 8 months is pricier with JPY437,850 for 60 lessons (plus JPY 18,900 for textbooks).

All in all, the ETP business in Japan thrives on promoting the idea of English as a magical tool to make overseas travel safer, more fun and meaningful.

The flip side of the discourse, however, works to instil a profound sense of anxiety and helplessness in prospective travellers as travelling overseas without English emerges as hard and dangerous, if not impossible. I’ve lost count of the Japanese people I’ve met, who shyly or anxiously claimed “I’m scared of going overseas because I can’t speak English.”

None of this linguistic burden, anxiety or any sense of exclusion was evident in my hour-long conversation with the Tanakas. They marveled at the land of smiles and all things Thai – its people, food and cultures – that are found alongside the wide variety of Japanese signs, products and services to which they can turn should the need arise.

Bangkok was recently named the world’s third top tourism destination for 2012, after London and Paris. Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide’s global economic advisor, pointed out Bangkok’s “tolerant culture” as the winning aspect. In light of the Tanakas’ experience, Bangkok obviously offers more than ‘cultural tolerance’. It is a multilingual city where an elderly Japanese couple are able to enjoy their stay on their own, to have meaningful contact with the locals, and to be highly mobile, all without that so-called ‘service-winning proper’ English.

Indeed, the discourse of ETP makes little sense in the ‘real’ Bangkok as an overseas tourism destination; its linguistic landscape and multilingual service provisions help to make visitors welcome and demonstrate that in contemporary Asia you can get fantastic service without English.

Gay men, English and desire in Bangkok

I have recently begun working on my MA thesis on sexuality and second language learning at the Graduate School of English, Assumption University of Thailand, under the supervision of Kimie Takahashi. She has encouraged me to share my experience in developing this project here on Language on the Move. Funny enough, my research topic is often seen as ‘outside the box’ here, but it came quite naturally, so to speak, and here is why.

In 2010, I arrived in Bangkok as an international student from Taiwan, and since then I’ve been introduced to many fashionable gay hubs, such as the glamorous Telephone Bar or The Balcony on Silom Soi 4 or the always-packed DJ Station on Soi 2.  The city has always been well-known  internationally for its gay-friendliness and sexual diversity (Jackson, 2011), and indeed these places are packed with international couples, especially Asian and Western.

What struck me most about Bangkok’s international gay scene here is that these Asian gay men from non-English-speaking backgrounds, do not only speak good English but also seem very confident and skilful in socialising with Westerners: they so elegantly flirt, joke around and engage in intellectual conversations on the economy, education, globalisation and whatnot, all in English. They definitely don’t fit the image of Asians as deficient or shy speakers of English that is still paramount in the literature that I have been reading since I began my master’s degree in ELT. I’m pretty sure that they’d roll their eyes or be offended if I told them how Asians are talked about as such by researchers.

When I initially started developing an MA thesis project last year, I didn’t know that what I had observed in my daily life could be a research topic. Having read A Passion for English by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi (2006), I learned that research on the intersection of sexuality and desire in second language learning is actually cutting-edge I then decided to propose a project that would look into the language learning trajectory of gay Asian men in Bangkok, to explore if they were like the Japanese women in their study who developed akogare (desire) for the English language alongside their fantasy for Western masculinity.

Having decided to model my project on Ingrid’s and Kimie’s work, I looked for similar ELT studies with a focus on Asian gay men’s desire for English and the West. My pursuit was rather fruitless. Brian King (2008) explains that although the fields of ELT in general and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in particular have investigated learner motivation and learner identities since the 1980s, the literature has suffered from heteronormativity. Indeed, doing my literature review has made me wonder what kind of world previous research has been occupying for the last so many decades – certainly not the one occupied by millions of fellow gay and lesbian friends of mine living side by side with fellow heterosexual folks.

As such the fields of ELT and SLA have failed to address why gay learners aspire to learn English or how such aspirations manifest in their linguistic practices and learning or if being gay really matters at all. Similarly, the fields of Sexuality Studies or Sociology seem to have paid little attention to the language learning trajectories of gay Asian men who desire Western men. My study is thus designed t to fill this gap in the literature on Asian gay men’s desire for English and Western men, and how their desires may impact their opportunities to learn and use English in Bangkok.

As part of the requirements for my degree, I defended my proposal, a critical ethnography of Asian gay men’s desire and second language learning in Bangkok, to the proposal committee in April, 2012. One of the comments by an examiner was “This is an interesting project. It’s like thinking outside the box”. I was flattered, of course, as every new research has to be original and innovative. But, at the same time, the metaphor of the ‘box’ seems to index the very problem I’m going to challenge head-on, i.e., heteronormativity. For me, a gay man belonging to the thriving gay community in Bangkok and beyond, what I’m going to look into is pretty much inside the box.

References
Jackson, P. A. (2011). Queer Bangkok : Twenty-first-century markets, media, and rights. Aberdeen, Hong Kong; Chiang Mai, Thailand: Hong Kong Univ. Press; Silkworm Books.

King, B. (2008). “Being Gay Guy, That is the Advantage”: Queer Korean Language Learning and Identity Construction Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (3-4), 230-252 DOI: 10.1080/15348450802237855

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59–83.

English and ASEAN

Ever since I arrived in Bangkok in 2011, I’ve being witnessing the amazing spread of English fever. At the national level, Thailand is wholeheartedly invested in the promise of English – the idea that proficiency in English will make ‘it’ happen for them, be it more economic development, more participation in global spheres or more 21^st century cosmopolitan look to the international community. “Learn/teach English, better and faster!” is very much the message at the education level where we are seeing the rising number of English-medium programs in secondary and higher education, the constant come-and-go of fly-in/fly-out ‘language experts’ in Bangkok, and mushrooming private English language schools throughout the country. Similar to those in many other non-English speaking Asian nations, everybody I know wants to learn English to get a good job, and most academics I meet speak of English as the key to Thailand’s brighter economic future.

The discourse of English for employment and for national competitiveness was also on everyone’s lips at this year’s Thai TESOL Conference (27 -28 Jan, 2012). One of the first panels on Day 1, “Thailand English language readiness and action plans for ASEAN 2015”, argued that English is imperative towards the launch of the Asean Community in 2015. In less than three years from now, they pointed out, the ten Asean nations will open their national borders, and Thai nationals will have to compete against English-speaking professionals and skilled workers from the other member states in local employment sectors. The panel warned that Thai people’s English is not good enough and that lack of English will leave the nation out in the cold, a sentiment that is widely circulating in media. Having attended this panel and other papers, I came out of the conference with a sense of renewed interest in the issue as well as a great sense of puzzlement.

First of all, although everyone seems to recite “Thai people’s English is not good enough”, the discussion stops short of explaining what not good enough means and for what. Most academics I speak to suggest that the notion of ‘native-speaker’ is dead in that non-native speakers should be proud of their ‘non-standard variety of English’ (whatever that maybe). However, papers at the conference and discussions I’ve had in Bangkok to date seem to suggest otherwise; these are all about how a Thai accent has to be eliminated or how Thai grammar interferes with standard English grammar, or that Thai people should stop being shy, etc. All of these discourses are evidence for the fact that the native speaker/Western ideal is well and truly alive. This schizophrenic-like approach to assessment of what’s good English is the hidden mechanism that keeps Thai non-native speakers of English forever insecure about their English, and that keeps Western native speaker teachers popular in the job market.

Another sense of puzzlement comes from a near-absence of research reports on actual language needs in Thailand’s employment sectors. This strikes me as odd, particularly since the current push for English has a strong employment basis as discussed above. At the conference, little information was offered as to what level of proficiency in what languages are needed or valued for what kinds of positions in what industry. The lack of such research, and the single-minded focus on English, also seem to blind us from multilingual resources that already exist and have worked well in industries such as tourism, and that could be expanded to strengthen Thailand’s competitiveness.

Phanisara (Nina) Logsdon on the panel above rightly called for a sustainable approach to improving language policy and education in Thailand towards 2015. Collaborative research between researchers and local industry partners, with an aim to producing an in-depth understanding of linguistic resources and changing linguistic needs in local employment sectors, may just contribute towards building part of a sustainable approach. In Asia as a whole, it’s been a popular practice to bring in Western ‘language experts’ to a country for a week or so, but such an approach has proven to be of limited benefits. A sustainable approach to researching language resources and needs entails inviting experts with a proven record of industry-based research, to work with us for capacity building on a long-term basis.

Without empirically-based research and long-term research collaborations between local and international researchers from relevant fields and industrial partners, Thailand’s debate on language policy and programs, including Thailand’s Year 2012 English Speaking Program (for which Tony Blair is a fly-in/fly-out English teacher), will remain uninformed and even continue to work as an unproductive threat to society.

Billboard advertising the Japanese food fair at Isetan

I’ve never felt more welcome in a foreign city than where I am at the moment – Bangkok! It has to do with Thai people’s gorgeous smiles, but there is more to this city that makes me feel at home. It is Bangkok’s amazing multilingual landscape, including the pervasiveness of Japanese! Before I left Sydney, I had a vague idea of Bangkok’s linguistic diversity, and simply assumed that English would be the default foreign language of public signs as Thom Huebner’s research has shown.However, I never expected to find so many Japanese businesses, products and services that target Japanese people here. The signage of Bangkok is simply overflowing with Japanese!

It all started to make sense after I learned some interesting statistics. According to Japan Tourism Marketing Co., 886,783 Japanese tourists visited Thailand in 2010. In addition, there are more than 7,000 registered Japanese businesses and over 47,000 registered Japanese residents here (the largest Japanese population in Asia outside Japan). Japanese signs are pretty much everywhere, but they are particularly concentrated in three areas – Sukhumvit, where many Japanese expats live, Sala Daeng, one of the financial hubs with many Japanese companies’ offices, and Pathumwan where two major Japanese department stores, Isetan and Tokyu, are located.

Let me take you to some small streets off Sukhumvit Road in Phrom Phong. You are now walking past a large range of Japanese restaurants, Fuji Super, beauty salons, real estate agencies, Japanese flower shops, bakeries, cram schools, one-dollar shops, Shimako and Fuji hairdressers, second hand book stores, all predominantly catering for Japanese customers. Moving into Thaniya in Sala Daeng, you also find many Japanese restaurants, but what stands out in this financial area is the large number of hostess bars (different from Bangkok’s famous go-go bars, and similar to those you find in Japan), whose clientele are mainly Japanese business men, their clients from Japan and male tourists.

Up-market Japanese unagi restaurant in Phrom Phong

Having said that, none of these businesses have monolingual Japanese shop signs. Even though their main clientele is Japanese, their shop signs are usually multilingual in Japanese, English and Thai. Obviously English serves the purpose of creating an international image as well as attracting non-Japanese who are into Japanese products and services. By contrast, the inclusion of Thai in shop signs is a different story. Thailand has a ‘sign tax’, which is apparently quite complex even for business consultants here, but basically, you pay much less sign tax if your commercial signage includes Thai on top of other languages. As a result, many shop signs include Thai, even if the font size is relatively small. I assume that businesses such as the upmarket Japanese restaurant in the picture have a relatively small Thai clientele. At the same time, it seems the sign tax works well to maintain the presence of the Thai language in Bangkok’s increasingly multilingual landscape, against the increasing prevalence of other languages, particularly English and Japanese.

Snacks with Japanese brand names and catch phrases

It is not only in areas with many Japanese residents and tourists that you find Japanese signage and advertisements. Just like Dubai, Bangkok has seen a ‘Japan boom’ in recent years, and as such, the Japanese language is widely used to boost the image of various local businesses and products for Thai consumers and foreign residents. A good example of this is snacks. There is an amazing range of snacks and sweets with Japanese brand names and catch phrases, even though many of them are not produced by Japanese companies. These snacks can be found practically everywhere, including small local markets where Japanese customers are unlikely to shop.

In contrast to static shop signage, Japanese signs printed on packages are always on the move: they are constantly moving from factories to trucks to shops to customers’ hands to rubbish bins, powerfully integrating Japanese into Bangkok’s public space as well as hundreds of thousands of workplaces and private homes in Bangkok.

Reference

Huebner, T. (2006). Bangkok’s Linguistic Landscapes: Environmental Print, Codemixing and Language Change International Journal of Multilingualism, 3 (1), 31-51 DOI: 10.1080/14790710608668384