Impromptu

A few weeks ago, I was a judge in the provincial English language, and specifically, impromptu speech competition.  (There are also competitions for storytelling, debate, multiskills, and spelling.)  Don’t let the name fool you.  The way this competition works is Thai teachers help students write a speech on a specific topic, usually something like their family or their school.  (Sometimes the help takes the form of writing it completely for the student.)  The student then memorizes the speech and prays that the topic will be the same as the one that he or she draws at random from a hat.  At the particular competition I was judging, there were 4 possible topics to choose from (which included “the environment,” “ASEAN,” and the old standbys,  “my family” and “my school”) and the students were allowed to draw twice, which meant they basically had a 50-50 chance of picking the topic they had memorized.

If a student is so unfortunate as to end up with a topic that does not match the speech that he or she has memorized, generally one of two things happens.  Either, more commonly, he or she will simply give the memorized speech, which the judges will mark down for content; or, he or she will boldly go where few impromptu speechifiers have gone before and actually attempt to talk about the chosen topic, which in my admittedly scant experience, yields about 30 seconds of broken sentences, often repeated, marginally related to the topic. 

At the competition I judged, the other judges told me that if a student did not score at least a 60, they would not receive a certificate for having competed (or something like that, I wasn’t entirely sure given my ever-persistent language limitations), so we ended up raising everyone’s score by 8 points so that the lowest-scoring student would reach the 60 point threshold.

Now amidst this rather dismaying display of English skills (bear in mind that these students had all won competitions at the municipal level), there was one tiny fourth grader who blew everyone away by talking about environmental problems, including a recent oil spill that occurred just off the coast nearby, and offered specific concrete suggestions for addressing them.  She spoke very slightly accented English with fair fluency in terms of cadence and emphasis, used relatively complex sentence structures, and evinced a vocabulary of which any American junior school student could be proud.  In short, she spoke better English than I’ve as yet heard from any of the English teachers at my school.

Unfortunately, there is no space in the competition for the judges to ask questions, so I had no way of telling whether she actually understood what she was saying or had just memorized her speech really well and practiced its delivery until she had achieved the remarkable naturalness that she displayed at the competition.  The other judges told me that there is a special English program at her school, so I’ll leave my cynical side muzzled and applaud her accomplishment. 

In any case, this should stand as one example among many of the huge range of achievement in English skills here in Thailand.  Assuming that native linguistic ability is spread pretty evenly around, I believe that the usual factors of socio-economic difference, both individual and collective, are what account for these differences in achievement.  Where there’s more money, there are better facilities, more motivated, less overworked teachers, etc. etc.; or, people with more means send their kids to private schools or better public schools in the city.

Could I talk about this issue off the top of my head in Thai?  Maybe for around 30 seconds or so.