Secret no longer

The good news is that this teaching material appears to be widely used. Our website now gets more than 60,000 visits a month. That’s “visits,” not the meaningless measure “hits”. Until we reduced the number of graphics on the site, we got about a million of those.

The bad news is that most of this traffic comes from abroad, particularly the United States. Here in Thailand, Internet usage among our key target audience, Thai English teachers, appears to be extremely limited. This is slowly changing although it is still quite remarkable how many Thai teachers still do not have an email address.

As a result, our web-based resource programme is largely an unknown quantity in our home market. That’s unfortunate because the Bangkok Post is one of the premier resources for English language learning. And there is hardly a newspaper anywhere in the world that provides more in teacher support – certainly none our size.

So, starting this week, we are going to raise our profile. We are going to lay out what we have to offer and then take a much more active role in the school community. There are limits, of course, with a six-page section to produce each week and an Internet site to maintain. But if you are in English language education, changes are good we will meet up some day.

Overwhelming choice

Few would dispute that the newspaper can play a constructive role in an advanced English course. After all, the content is current. If large numbers of people are talking about something, chances are it is receiving coverage in the Bangkok Post. And if it relates to Thailand, students are sure to have read or heard about it through the Thai-language media, so background is not a problem.

The content is extremely varied as well – news, sports, opinion, entertainment, you name it, it’s there. And with more than 150 stories to choose from each day, there is bound to be something of relevance to virtually any class.

If anything, there is too much choice and it is not surprising that some English teachers find our newspaper to be a bit overwhelming. Thus, one of our first and most important tasks at the learning post is to help them make sense of it all, to help them see the patterns and consistencies – the timeless elements of the newspaper.

There are many. Headlines have clear patterns, for example. News stories are rigidly structured with the key information right at the top, making them easy to edit and even easier to read. Feature writers have more latitude, but they too use familiar devices that are relatively easy to discern. And if it’s persuasive writing you want, head to the opinion section.

Content is fresh everyday, but here, too, the consistencies are striking. What is considered to be news is actually quite limited (an interesting topic for a lesson, incidentally). Look at today’s paper and try to categorise the topics. You’ll find exactly what you would expect: subject areas like politics, crime, environmental and health concerns, natural or man-made disasters, sporting news, and, of course, the activities of celebrities.

The job for us here at the learning post is help enable learners to read widely within such subject areas. Thus, in covering the Bangkok election, for example, we also have an eye towards elections to come: the run-off election for the Indonesian presidency, the US presidential election in November and, of course, the general election in Thailand (date to be announced).

Lessons for downloading

Over the years, the learning post and its predecessor, the educational services department, have produced dozens of classroom activities and presentations covering the style and recurrent content of the newspaper. The problem has been distribution. What we have lacked is an easily accessible central repository where teachers can obtain the lessons they want when they want them.

With the Internet, the biggest central repository of them all, that is no longer the obstacle it once was. Enlisting the aid of the Bangkok Post’s electronic publishing department, we recently set up a section on our website where teachers can quickly download the material they need on to their own computers. This material includes standard lessons, activity sheets, teachers’ notes in both Thai and English as well as the PowerPoint presentations we use in our seminars.

It has been an instant success. Within the first month and with little fanfare, almost a gigabyte of material was downloaded. Once again, however, the vast majority went abroad – not exactly what we had intended. It was also problematic because bandwidth is expensive.

The solution has been to restrict access to local teachers who actually use the Bangkok Post with their classes. We now have a user name and password system that is freely available to teachers who order in bulk – as well as anyone else who can convince us they have a genuine need. We are flexible.

Tuesday support

Of course, the value of the newspaper lies not in its consistent style and recurrent content. We buy newspapers for fresh content. This presents an altogether different challenge. When teachers receive their copy of the Bangkok Post, they would most appreciate lessons based on that particular issue.

We have always been able to accommodate them on Tuesdays – at least as far as our section, the learning post, is concerned. As a weekly section, we know what will appear well in advance, so we are able to provide teachers with an extensive set of teachers’ notes. These notes are automatically sent to teachers who order the paper in bulk, but they are also freely available from our website – no user name or password required – to anyone who chooses to use them.

The daily sections are obviously a different story. Printing doesn’t even begin until mid-afternoon Monday and the front section can go to press as late as midnight. Again, the Internet provides the solution.

About two months ago we began a regular web-based service called “notes for Tuesday’s Bangkok Post”. The format is actually that of a web log or “blog” which has become so popular among the Internet surfing community.

For us, the advantage of the blog is speed and ease of use. We can post content at any time from any place with virtually none of the formatting headaches common to ordinary web pages. For users, predominately teachers in this case, the content is very easy to view and manipulate. Teachers simply scroll down through the material, cutting and pasting what they want into a word processing program. Then, it’s up to them how they want to use it. The blog also has links for teachers to comment on the material and to make suggestions.

We actually begin the blog late Monday afternoon with our advanced copy on the Tuesday Outlook section. By 5:00 p.m., we will usually have posted notes and vocabulary on two or three Outlook features, giving teachers with an early Tuesday class ample time to prepare.

We also post notes throughout Tuesday morning on the front section and occasionally the business section. Thus, by noon, teachers will normally have their choice of lessons on eight or more stories or columns from several sections of the paper. We aim for variety both in content and difficulty, so teachers have the best chance to find lessons appropriate to their particular teaching situations.

The general weblog

The blogging program we use was developed especially for the learning post by our electronic publishing department. It has proven to be so fast and so efficient that it has been impossible to resist the temptation to extend our service beyond Tuesday. Enter the general weblog.

The aim here is to reach those people who are using the Bangkok Post to improve their English through self-study. This includes secondary students with their sights on a university education, university students, people in the business community as well as that large group of people who simply enjoy learning English.

At present, our general blog is updated each Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The postings are not nearly as extensive as the Tuesday blog, but they are appropriate for learners studying on their own for ten or twenty minutes a day – the minimum necessary to really see an improvement. Given our busy schedules, postings are a bit sporadic, so the best time for users to check in is probably in the evening.

Other Internet resources

Obviously the main focus of the learning post website is the learning post itself. Much of our newspaper content appears on the site on Tuesday and key columns and features have extensive archives as well. In addition, all our front page feature content pertaining to Thai education has been carefully organised and archived under a special section called “Education in Thailand.” This is accessible from our home page.

For regular visitors, there is internet-only feature entitled “words in the news.” This a “word-of-the-day” column based on words appearing in recent Bangkok Post news stories. Here we try to avoid the obscure vocabulary seen on so many other word-of-the day sites in favour of words you are most likely to see in news stories.

There you have it. The site is open 24 hours a day, so feel free to check it out at http://www.bangkokpost.com/education.