The Nation
http://nationmultimedia.com/2007/08/21/national/national_30045838.php

Published on August 21, 2007

English tutors failing the test

Just one in 10 can score more than 60 per cent

Training is needed urgently to improve the standard of English teaching in Thailand, senior government and private educationalists said after seeing the "highly unimpressive scores" in a recent test of English-language teachers.

Of the 14,189 teachers in 30 tourism-oriented provinces who took the test, 74.59 per cent scored less than 41 marks out of a possible 100, according to an Office of Basic Education Commission (OBEC) report.

Only 9.94 per cent of the teachers scored between 60 and 100 marks, while 15.47 per cent managed to score between 42 and 60 marks.

The lowest score earned in the test - which allotted 30 marks for listening ability, 30 marks for reading, 20 marks for writing and 20 marks for speaking - was two.

Among the 30 provinces from where the teachers who took the test came were Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai, Sukhothai and Chon Buri.

The test was conducted jointly by OBEC and Ramkhamhaeng University as a follow-up to a previous one conducted four years ago in which 90 per cent of English-language teachers also did poorly.

The OBEC report described English teaching in Thailand currently as a "failure", and cited the lack of direct education in teaching English for local teachers as the main reason.

Asst Prof Chaleosri Phiboolchol, chairperson of the English-language Teachers' Association of Thailand, said most of the approximately 500,000 English teachers in government and private schools at primary and secondary level "were made to do their jobs" without basic qualifications or proper training.

She suggested giving scholarships and providing training and rewarding outstanding teachers as solutions to encourage self-development among English teachers.

Assoc Prof Suchada Nimmannit, a lecturer with Chulalongkorn University's Language Institute, said the Education Ministry had failed to substantially improve English teachers.

"Training every few years for teachers is not enough to develop them academically," she added.

She said that if sending Thai English-language teachers to countries with native English speakers and highly professional training was too expensive, exchange programmes among Southeast Asian countries would be good enough to expose them to new experiences and prompt them to adjust to all-English environments.

Akkhara Akkharanithi, a lecturer at the Language Institute, said the teaching of English should also be improved at kindergarten level, where all the teachers are too burdened with full-time tasks to improve their English teaching.

She suggested that all government English teachers who worked for more than five years should be allowed to study English overseas on their own funds, while more scholarships should be made available to those who proved to be outstanding English teachers.

Thammarat Kijchalong

The Nation

International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=4698260

Bangkok's template for an air-quality turnaround
By Thomas Fuller
Friday, February 23, 2007


BANGKOK: Black smoke billowing from tailpipes into the humid, tropical air was once a Bangkok trademark. But a decade and a half after Thailand began a battle for better air quality, this erstwhile icon of smog has emerged as a role model for Asia's pollution-choked capitals, boasting considerably cleaner air than Beijing, Jakarta, New Delhi and Shanghai.

Some buses here still belch toxic vapor. And Thailand's political future is hard to plot as the country seeks to extricate itself from the tangled legacy of the military-led coup last September. Yet the skies in Bangkok on most days are blue, thanks to the work of a small, dedicated group of bureaucrats who pressed the case for cleaner air despite a history of weak, short-lived governments.

"There's a huge difference when you walk around the streets," said Jitendra Shah, a coordinator at the World Bank for environment and social issues in Southeast Asia who has worked in Bangkok since the 1990s. "Breathing is definitely easier."

Thailand's battle against air pollution provides a virtual how-to manual of environmental cleanup, say Shah and other air quality experts in Asia. Thai officials cajoled oil companies to produce cleaner fuel, used higher taxes to phase out the once-ubiquitous two- stroke motorcycles and converted all taxis to run on clean-burning liquefied petroleum gas. They overcame lobbying campaigns from the large, mostly Japanese-owned car industry and imposed progressively stricter emissions controls based on European norms (Thailand had no emissions standards before 1992).

The local government enacted simple but highly effective measures like washing the streets to keep the dust down. Buddhist crematoria in and around the city were urged to change from wood-burning pyres to more sophisticated electric incinerators.

The striking result is that, while the number of motor vehicles registered in Bangkok has increased by 40 percent over the past decade, the average levels of the most dangerous types of pollution — small dust particles that embed themselves in the lungs — have been cut by 47 percent, from 81 to 43 micrograms per cubic meter during the same period. Bangkok's air, on average, now falls within the limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of 50 micrograms per cubic meter, but is above the European Union limit of 40.

"It's possible for others to follow what we've done here," said Supat Wangwongwatana, director general of the pollution control department at Thailand's Ministry of Environment.

It's a line that Supat has used often in recent years. The World Bank and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have dispatched him to countries around the region, including India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, to speak in antipollution workshops.

Four decades ago Thailand did not even have a word for pollution — there was barely use for it in a city with many fewer cars. It was only in 1976 that the country's Royal Institute, the official arbiter of the Thai language, coined the word "mollapit." The word means "poison or toxins that come from impurity or dirtiness," according to Naiyana Wara-aswapati, a senior linguist at the institute.

Yet giving pollution a name was far easier than cleansing the air. And as pedestrians in Bangkok can attest, some of the poison still lingers. The city still has nagging air quality problems especially — and paradoxically — in neighborhoods served by the city's relatively new mass transit system, which was supposed to help ease pollution by allowing commuters to leave their cars at home.

Pollution gets trapped underneath the concrete platforms of the elevated railway and can rise to levels that rival the most polluted cities in Asia: 85 to 180 micrograms per cubic meter of dust particles — many times higher than the World Health Organization's guidelines of 20 micrograms per cubic meter.

"No matter how much cleaner the gasoline becomes it stills stinks," said Chainarong Nobnobe, a traffic police officer working in one of the most congested areas of Bangkok. "There should be measures to limit the number of cars."

Greater Bangkok, with a population of about 10 million, has not yet achieved the air quality of Singapore or Tokyo. These latter cities have on average the cleanest air of major Asian capitals — air quality roughly equivalent to New York City's. But what Bangkok has shown is that you do not need to have Singapore's authoritarian legacy or Tokyo's riches to make radical improvements to the environment.

Thailand has also demonstrated that a thriving car industry is not incompatible with cleaner air, said Shah of the World Bank. Thailand, which will produce about 1.28 million cars and trucks and 3.5 million motorcycles this year, is Asia's third-largest exporter of vehicles, after Japan and Korea.

Part of Bangkok's success in cleaning its air is due to luck and geography. Unlike Los Angeles, Bangkok has no surrounding mountains to trap smog. Unlike Beijing, which has some of the worst air in East Asia, power plants around Bangkok do not use coal. Thailand gets natural gas from neighboring Myanmar and its own platforms in the Gulf of Thailand; 70 percent of the country's power production is from natural gas, which burns more cleanly than coal.

Most of the credit for the cleaner air, however, goes to a group of strong- willed environmental pioneers, said Nuntavarn Vichit-Vadakan, dean of the Faculty of Public Health at Thammasat University. Technocrats, often trained in the United States, convinced politicians of the need for action, Nuntavarn said.

They faced considerable resistance. Supat, the director of the pollution control department, helped usher in Thailand's first laws on tailpipe emissions, based mainly on European standards. In the early 1990s he traveled to Japan with Kasem Sanitwong Na Ayutthaya, the current environment minister, to persuade Japanese automakers to make and sell cleaner cars in Thailand.

Bhichit Rattakul, a U.S.-trained microbiologist, created the Anti-Air Pollution & Environmental Protection Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, in 1986, well before going green was trendy. Elected Bangkok governor in 1996, he planted 400,000 trees, cracked down on polluting trucks and established stricter rules for dusty construction sites.

When Bhichit announced that the local government would transform an 18-hole golf course incongruously located on the outskirts of Bangkok into a giant park, he famously faced off with hundreds of protesting golf caddies who barricaded themselves on the grounds of the club and threw golf balls and bricks at officials who tried to dislodge them. (Police ultimately dispersed the caddies and the area is today a public park as planned.)

Piyasvasti Amranand, a former secretary general of Thailand's National Energy Policy Office, in 1991 established the country's first comprehensive plan to remove lead, sulfur and other harmful chemicals from fuel. Piyasvasti, who is now energy minister, says he encountered strong resistance from Western oil companies and Japanese car manufacturers; he recalled long debates over the proposed introduction of catalytic converters, the device that neutralizes harmful chemicals before they are emitted from tailpipes.

At the time, Bangkok's air was laden with dust, lead and other harmful chemicals. In 1993, 28 percent of children tested at six Bangkok schools had lead concentrations higher than the acceptable threshold set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control: 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood. Traffic policemen and bus drivers also showed high lead levels but in children it was considered most harmful because lead has been shown to retard mental development.

After Thailand completely phased out lead gasoline 1995 (a year before the United States although the U.S. had started its gradual reduction program in 1973, well before Thailand) lead levels plummeted in Bangkok. By 2000 only 3 percent of children at the same schools in Bangkok were above the threshold.

In the West as in Thailand leaded gasoline seems like ancient history. Yet one measure of Thailand's head-start is that in Indonesia refineries stopped producing leaded gasoline only last year.

In the early 1990s Supat used data on the high lead levels in schoolchildren to convince the owner's of Thailand's major oil refineries, motorcycle and car manufacturers – and the public – that something needed to be done.

Although public concern about pollution was rising, Supat said many Thais were also worried that better fuel and more efficient engines would cost more money. Supat responded by saying that the black smoke coming out of vehicles was unburnt fuel. "We're wasting a lot of fuel out of the tailpipe," he remembers repeating.

In the end it was consumers, not industry, that paid for the higher quality fuel and tighter emissions controls on cars. The government altered the tax structure to make unleaded gasoline cheaper even though it was more expensive to produce than leaded fuel. This was achieved by sleight of hand: Officials avoided a loss of revenue for the government by quietly raising a levy on gasoline several months before the introduction of unleaded fuel, channeling the extra proceeds into a special oil fund, and then lowering the levy only for unleaded fuel.

"That is the pattern we've been using all along: increasing the oil fund without people noticing. Slip it in," Piyasvasti said.

Piyasvasti used the same tactic last October, raising the oil levy in preparation for greater incentives for biodiesel (diesel mixed with locally produced palm oil) and gasohol (gasoline mixed with ethanol made from locally produced sugar cane and tapioca). These fuels, which have been available in small quantities since 2004, burn more cleanly and help Thailand reduce its oil and energy imports, which today stand at around 60 percent of energy consumption. The government hopes that once taxes are lowered consumers will be drawn in greater numbers to these fuels.

"The general public likes lower prices. That's the most important thing," Piyasvasti said.

On the streets of Bangkok, residents give the city's fight against pollution mixed reviews.

Suwanna Jusing, 50, the owner of a roadside restaurant in northern Bangkok, said pollution had improved during the three decades she had been selling her chicken, pork and shrimp noodle dishes to customers at roadside tables. The authorities are trying to make Bangkok "a better place to live," she said. "And that makes me happy."

Pacharapun Tinnabal, 25, a graduate student who recently returned after living three years in Jakarta, said she was relieved to return home because the air in the Indonesian capital is "far more polluted."

But others, such as Thongpoon Nawiman, a 41-year-old motorcycle messenger who spends five days a week wending through Bangkok's wide boulevards and tiny alleys, is not satisfied. "The air is still polluted, and the traffic is still bad," he said.

Bhichit, the former Bangkok governor, agrees that there's lots of room for improvement.

"I'm still not a happy man," he said. "I'm trying to demand more."

After his 4-year term as governor, which ended in 2000, Bhichit returned to a career of environmental activism, and reinvigorating his anti-air pollution foundation.

Hundreds of volunteers filmed and photographed buses spewing black smoke, evidence that Bhichit used in a lawsuit against the city's transit authority. Last year he won a partial victory to retire some decrepit, polluting buses, but the transit authority is appealing the decision.

"They should revoke the licenses of these people," Bhichit said. He blames Supat at the pollution control department for not cracking down hard enough.

It will be years before all of the ancient buses and two-stroke motorcycles hit the scrap heap. But as they slowly fade away, Bangkok's air will improve even more, say experts. Close to 100 percent of motorcycle sold in Thailand today have 4-stroke engines, an almost total reversal from a decade earlier. Supat is also trying to convince drivers of Bangkok's 9,000 iconic but heavily polluting three-wheeled "tuk-tuks" to change over to 4-stroke engines.

In November the government approved the construction of five new or extended light-rail lines, scheduled for completion in 2012. The city is also planning a "Bus Rapid Transport" system, a network of dedicated bus lanes separated from traffic.

The car will remain king in Bangkok for years, but government officials say they hope residents will leave them at home most days.

"There's no problem to own a car but don't use it that much," Supat said.