How well do Thai students do in English compared to other Asian students?  The short answer is, not very well.  When measured against other Asian countries, Thailand does poorly.  Surprisingly, it does just about as well as countries who spend very little on English education.  By comparison, Thailand spends a lot and considers improvement in English a major national economic and educational priority.

Many first time visitors to Thailand are surprised to find that English is not well understood nor spoken well even in big centers such as Bangkok or Chiang Mai.   Shop-keepers, tourist operators and businessmen catering to foreigners speak enough English to carry on their trade.  But that's about it.  Outside the cities, the situation is even more dramatic.  Very few Thais there can carry on a conversation in English beyond a sentence or two.  

This general inability is also reflected in the schools.  Elementary, secondary, even university students have managed to rote memorize snippets of conversation and vocabulary.  But most cannot create their own English.  Many have succeeded in memorizing and recognizing a fairly sizeable vocabulary but few can build conversation around these words.  More extensive is the student's knowledge of English words that belong to western culture.  This includes sports (football in particular), movies, music and the entertainment industry.  Students of all ages know that Superman can fly, Batman drives a cool car and Spiderman can climb very well. 

Overall, most Thai students have a fairly good vocabulary.  Even quite young children know the names of animals, colors and foods.  It is the ability to express ideas in anything resembling sentences or groups of sentences that is strikingly absent. 

Of the 4 language abilities, reading, writing listening and speaking, listening is the number one challenge for Thai students when formal testing is conducted.  Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that, for the most part, English is taught by Thai teachers who also have trouble with English pronunciation.  Consequently, many English words are mispronounced by students who then have difficulty when words are pronounced correctly by native speakers.  To illustrate:  the word HAPpy when correctly pronounced has the louder syllable at the beginning.  However Thais would say the same word as haPPY with the louder syllable at the end.  When all two syllable words are thus spoken, the English sounds quite different.  Correctly spoken English then becomes more difficult to understand.