Reading from the same script
A new bilingual curriculum allows schoolchildren in the South to learn Thai more easily alongside their mother tongue Malay
Rohkiyoh Abu recalls the bad experiences in primary school which she hopes her children will never have to face. Referring to her first months in school, the 28-year-old Muslim mother of two from the southern province of Pattani explained, “I could not communicate with the teacher who spoke Thai in the classroom.”
Like most people in her Muslim-majority community, Ms Rohkiyoh’s family spoke Patani Malay at home. Her parents could not speak or write Thai.
Ms Rohkiyoh faced culture shock when she attended Ban Lada, the public primary school in her village.
“If we spoke Malay in school, we would be fined,” Ms Rohkiyoh recalled.
“I didn’t understand a word the teacher said to the point where I did not want to go to school.”
The Thai government requires all public schools use Thai as the language of instruction.
Despite the language hurdles, Ms Rohkiyoh managed to get by and continued her formal education to finish high school. She eventually learned to read and write in Thai.
Now a housewife, Ms Rohkiyoh doesn’t want her own children to go through the same thing.
“I do not want my children to suffer a similar experience,” she said.
“I want my children to feel happy to go to school and not feel like they are being forced to speak Thai.”
Her eldest daughter, Afifa, is attending her old school, Ban Lada, which has since changed the classroom teaching style.
“Students can learn Thai while communicating in Patani Malay,” Ms Rohkiyoh explained.
On the day Spectrum visited, Afifa, a secondyear kindergarten pupil, was learning how to pronounce the Patani Malay language using the Thai alphabet. So were her classmates.
A teacher showed the young students a picture of a cat and a card with Thai characters that
phonetically formed the word kucin, the Patani Malay word for cat.
While many of her friends in the southern provinces send their children to private schools, Ms Rohkiyoh has plans for Afifa to continue her free education to eventually gain admission to a Thai university.
“Afifa is a smart girl. She is not shy to speak up in the classroom,” Ms Rohkiyoh said. “I want my daughter to have the highest education possible.” Afifa told Spectrum she wants to become a doctor.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Ban Lada is one of 16 schools in the four southern provinces of Yala, Narathiwat, Pattani and Satun which are trialling “mother tongue first bilingual education”, a pilot project conducted by Mahidol University.
The programme allows Malay-speaking students to learn to read and write first in Malay as a bridge to bilingual literacy.
Thailand’s public schools use Thai as the language of instruction since it is used in gross national literacy measurements.
There is no exception for the southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, where the Patani Malay dialect is spoken.
The same policy applies in other regions where dialects are spoken.
But unlike the South, they share a similar cultural and linguistic background to people in central Thailand.
Patani Malay, known by Thais as Yawi and colloquially as Jawi, is similar to Malaysian and uses a written script which is a combination of Arabic and Roman (or Rumi).
Educated Muslim parents can tutor their children at home or send them to private schools which conduct lessons in Patani Malay.
Some send their children to pondoks, traditional boarding religious schools where Malay is used and Islamic studies constitute the only curriculum.
However, the Thai-only formal education system does not work well in communities that use ethnic languages.
“The students should learn from their mother tongue to fully receive knowledge,” said Suwilai Premsrirat, project director of Patani Malay-Thai Bilingual Education at Mahidol University, who led a research team on bilingual education nine years ago.
Isra Sarntisart, a programme director of the Thailand Research Fund, added, “The Thai-only formal education has also caused the decline in the use of ethnic languages in Thailand.”
The aim now is to get Thai Malays to master the Thai language while allowing them to embrace their own. There are several ethnic dialects spoken in different parts of the country, including Miabri in Phrae province and So, or Thavung, in Sakon Nakhon province.
The Thailand Research Fund has sponsored Mahidol University to design the “orthography” for diverse ethnic groups, including Malayspeaking students, so that they can better understand classroom teaching via their own tongue. Orthography is the systematic representation of a language’s sounds by written script or symbols. In the projects Mahidol is developing, Thai script is used as the basis to develop the “sound” of the ethnic languages being spoken.
“The results of the students who graduated from bilingual programmes shows the positive result that the students could better interact in the classroom,” Ms Suwilai said.
“In the past, some students dared not ask to go to the toilet because they could only seek permission to go out of the classroom in Malay.”
The programme received the Unesco King Sejong Literacy Prize 2016 last month as part of International Literacy Day. Ms Suwilai went to Paris to receive the award.
MOTHER TONGUE
Wanna Udomsartsakul, the principal of Ban Lada School, said that the communities surrounding the school are low-income. Some are chilli farmers, while others work low-paid jobs in the city.
“When they are at home, they speak Malay. Some parents cannot speak Thai. So when the students come to school and we ask them to speak in Thai, it is not easy.”
Ms Wanna started at the school in 2005 with a mission to teach students to read and write Thai. She is from the southern province of Phattalung.
“We in Phattalung speak Thai with a thick southern accent. But here, the students speak a totally different language,” she said.
“Schools in other provinces may have a target of their students topping Onet scores. But for us, our wish is that at least half of them can read Thai.”
Ms Wanna said she tried additional classes in Thai but they did not work because many students still spoke Malay at home.
“Although we told students to speak Thai once they stepped across the school gate or else be fined one baht, the students did not bother,” she said.
“They preferred speaking their mother tongue or they chose not to speak in class at all.
SUWILAI PREMSRIRAT MAHIDOL UNIVERSITY The students should learn from their mother tongue to fully receive knowledge