FAQ: Why Thailand?

I’ve just returned from my 2^nd winter session studying for my Master of Arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Why Thailand? Because everybody in the Azusa Pacific University TESOL program already lives and teaches English in Asia except for me and two other women who are also part of Educational Services International in Europe. Thailand is the closest, freest, and cheapest place to stay, and the time and place coincides with several other conferences for other sending organizations and Asian school holidays. For me, it makes a nice escape from my cloudy, snowless city winter in Slovakia. But imagine trying to explain to the passport controller in Frankfurt, Germany why you’re coming in from Vienna, Austria but you work in Bratislava, but you’re going to Thailand to study English, but you’re really from the New York. (Obviously they let me through).

The first week’s course was one of my capstone classes called Action Research in Teaching English as a Second Language. So I’ll be researching the effects of different kinds of peer and teacher feedback on written assignments in my writing classes and how they affect error correction and writer confidence. (I actually think this is interesting.) Then the second course was called Second Language Assessment- another really practical immediate application to my teaching.

It was so refreshing to be a student again and soak up wisdom from professors I think really highly of…and have some time to think…and soak up some heat and sun…and eat spicy food with spoons and chopsticks…and lots of fruit…and have my own room for a week until my new roommates arrived…and drive up to the Thai/Myanmar/Laos border on the weekend…and be encouraged by my cohort mates with similar stories about teaching, working, studying, and being a foreigner.

It was all great fun, but like all holidays should do, it made me appreciate being back ‘home’ in my own European city again. Throughout the spring I’ll finish the work for these two classes, and then in July I’ll travel to APU's campus in Azusa, CA to present my research and take two final classes- Teaching Pronunciation and a second capstone called Language Curriculum Design. I’ll finish the work for those two classes during the fall semester and receive my M.A. in TESOL in December of this year. That was quick!