German teachers in Thailand
Be well-prepared for Goethe-Zertifikat with the German Club

The German Club is the first online training platform that aims to encourage Thai teaching staffs to get prepared for the B2 or C1 exam.

Raising the language level of Thai German teaching staffs

From August to December 2021, German teachers teaching in secondary level throughout Thailand attended the German Club for over 16 weeks. The German Club is an online training platform that enables teachers to improve their language skill and gain new inputs for their classes. The background: Usually, Thai teachers use German only in their classes. As large as Thailand is, the 51 schools nation-wide where German is being taught are highly scattered, which makes it hard for teachers to interact with each other. In order to discipline oneself and not to lose one’s German skill, some of them wished for further training possibilities. The goal is to prepare oneself linguistically for B2 or even C1 German examination.

Thematic formats instead of traditional exam training

Instead of offering traditional exam training, Stefan Göpel and Thanarat Dithwatcharapaisarn, both German instructors at Goethe-Institut, developed a format that stimulates one through thematically oriented assignments to raise their own language level and to actively use the German language both in speech and in writing.

Over the learning platform, Moodle, the attendees received assignments weekly that pertained to a concrete topic. “During the selection of the topics, we have oriented ourselves towards the wishes of the attendees” says Stefan Göpel. “From Starting over with Life during the Pandemic, Tips in Learning German, to Globalization, Nutrition, up to Consumption and Tourism, the topics orient themselves very strongly towards the working reality of the teachers. Sustainability has become the main emphasis of the entire Goethe-Institut Thailand through almost every subject matters. The teachers were, thus,  discussing, for instance, food waste or food in canteens”

Stefan Göpel and Thanarat Dithwatcharapaisarn placed special emphasis upon creating communicative exercises that really correspond to the interests of the teachers: “That automatically invigorates the conversation among one another and ensures that the language level gets elevated almost as if by the attendees themselves.” Textual, audio and video materials served as a fundament for the assignments for visual and auditory comprehension. The participants created, by themselves, audio or video contents reporting, for instance, about their lives during lockdown.

“Our requirement was that the assignments are to be fulfilled within 90 to 120 minutes. That is a very optimal workload, since all of the teachers are employed” says Stefan Göpel. “For this same reason, everyone cannot freely spare their time: There are not any online meetings; instead, the conversation takes place over the common Moodle forum where the work results can reciprocally be commented on.” Beside the discussion on the forum, a collaborative glossary was created, in order to gather all of the newly learnt words and, thus, to also make the learning progress apparent. Furthermore, the asynchronous learning has an advantage that it succeeds in bringing every participants up to par despite the differences in language level. Everybody can view the materials multiple times, look up unknown words or do additional research. “Well, we are very excited for the evaluation of the project and the feedback from the teachers, in order to consider possible continuation of the project”