I feel like I should jump in and contribute my own thoughts of TEFL International, Ban Phe, Thailand, so here goes:

TEFL International teach some great ideas as far as methodology goes. There is also an EXCELLENT professor there by the name of Dave Hopkins. Prof. Hopkins should be a tenured professor back in the states at Harvard or Stanford teaching this subject. They don't get any better in the TEFL industry, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, I learned almost from day one while teaching here in Thailand that TEFL's methods and the methods used at my school are worlds apart.

One technique used in TI's training program is the 'horseshoe'. It's called the horseshoe because that is supposedly the ideal seating arrangement in a TEFL classroom. It took about a month for my students to rebel against the horseshoe. My Thai students were unenthusiastic, to say the least, with a seating arrangement that was completely foreign to them. By the end of month two, I had pretty much abandoned the horseshoe altogether. I think I was using it only with my youngest learners, my M1 students (equivalent to 7th graders back in the states), by the time mid-terms rolled around the first semester.

It didn't matter. The horseshoe wasn't practical in my classes anyway. This is because my classes were HUGE. They were so huge that when I got my students into the horseshoe, the students on the opposing sides were so far apart they could barely hear each other speak. Some classes were so large the students on the ends had to sit outside the classroom. Indeed, I eventually branded the vast space between the students on the very tips 'The Gulf of TEFL'. Yes, I may have been able to fit a small boat in that space.

The horseshoe just didn't work. While I was moving around its vast perimeter using the T/T T/S S/T S/S pattern, most of the other students would become bored and start chattering in Thai or doing homework from other classes. This more or less eliminated the opportunity for my students to improve their listening skills. I soon decided there was no sense in 'beating a dead horseshoe', so the 'horseshoe' bit it.

Another technique I learned from TEFL that I had to abandon was 'self-access learning'. This is a great idea, and I hated to give it up, but I found both my students and my boss prefered the
time-tested 'direct teaching' methods my students' Thai teachers have used (with very little success, I might add) the last ten years or so. Indeed, my students would have nothing to do with my self-access approaches. I realized by the end of the first semester that Thai students prefer authority and being told what to do over actually doing things themselves in class or on their own outside of it.
Individual initiative and motivation are squashed here--as is the noble idea of 'self-access'.

Both the 'horseshoe' and 'self-access worked great at the gov't school where I did my teaching practice in Rayong while at TI. The classes were small there and the kids kept quiet during the 'rounds'. Yes, both self-access and the horseshoe worked well in Rayong. However, they didn't work at all at a school out in the sticks near Lopburi. I can't wait to go to another country to try out these great ideas again. Maybe my new students will embrace them.

RhenoThai