Upskilling English Speaking in Thai Cultural Contexts

Abstract

English speaking skills training for understanding through the context of Thai culture. It is a social and cultural factor in Thailand to access the attitudes, feelings of Thai people, leading to correct and natural communication. Therefore, it is essential that the learners should focus on practicing on the important issues, including: 1) to use or understand English, the important thing is not to know the meaning of words. Because, there is no language that can interpret the meaning exactly the language itself but it means the knowledge of interpreting according to the context or the situation in communicating, for example, the expression that fat chance or I'm easy does not mean that chance is fat and I am easy as most learners tend to translate directly, it is because these often-used expressions have a different view of the world through language than Thai culture, 2) Learning a language is not only learning about words but also learning about non-verbal things as well, 3) Thai and English languages are dictated by cultural perspectives. For example, Thai society is a society with high groupings; the western society is a society that focuses on high privacy, 4) the structure of the language itself affects cultural differences in terms of tenses or word order. These issues cause problems in communication such as the use of Simple Tense and Perfect Tense that Thai learners tend to use Simple Tense in communicating all the time. This is because of the convenience of not having to change the verb form, which may lead to miscommunication.