Why stories work
The idea behind story learning is simple: we acquire a language mainly by understanding it. Stephen Krashen put it most influentially in the 1980s as the input hypothesis, the claim that language grows from messages we understand that are pitched just above our level. Researchers still argue about how far that goes (most now think speaking, feedback and deliberate study matter too), but the core has held up well. Reading and listening a lot, at a level you mostly understand, builds vocabulary and grammar.
Two kinds of evidence stand out. In the “book flood” study in Fiji, primary-school pupils learning English who were given a supply of illustrated storybooks and time to read them made faster progress in reading and listening over a year than classmates taught with the usual audio-lingual course (Elley and Mangubhai, 1983). And studies of vocabulary show that learners pick up a word gradually, each meeting in context adding a little: in one experiment, recall rose steadily as the number of encounters with a word went from one to ten (Webb, 2007). Stories deliver exactly that kind of repetition, without the boredom of a word list.
Thai stories at your level
- Children’s picture books. Short sentences, everyday words and pictures that carry the meaning. Bookshops in Thailand have whole sections of them, many with audio.
- The old school readers. มานะ มานี ปิติ ชูใจ, the Ministry of Education’s primary readers from the 1970s to the 1990s, follow a group of children through their school years. They are graded with care, and generations of Thais know them, so they double as a conversation topic.
- Folk tales and fables. นิทาน, traditional tales and Aesop’s fables in Thai (นิทานอีสป), usually end with a stated moral, which is good practice in itself.
- Graded readers for learners, with glossaries and recordings, bridge the gap between children’s books and adult reading.
- Children’s television and cartoons with Thai subtitles, which give you the story as sound and as text at the same time.
How to use a story
- Listen first, if there is audio. Get the outline from the sound before you look at the text.
- Read with the audio. Following the Thai script while you listen teaches you where the words break, the hardest part of reading Thai, since there are no spaces between words.
- Read again on your own, slowly and aloud, working out the tone of each new word from its spelling. The tone rules page is worth keeping open.
- Look up only what blocks you. If a word appears once and the story still makes sense, let it go; if it keeps coming back, look it up and add it to your review deck with the sentence it came from.
- Retell the story, out loud or in writing, in the simplest Thai you can. Retelling turns understood words into words you can use.
- Come back a week later. A story you can now read easily is a good measure of progress and a pleasant way to review.
Aim for stories where you understand most of the words already. A page where every second word is new is a dictionary exercise, not reading; if that is where you are, choose something simpler and read more of it.
What is particular about Thai
- Finding the words. Thai is written without spaces between words, so early reading is partly a puzzle of where one word ends. Stories help, because the context narrows the choices and the audio settles them.
- Spoken and written registers. Children’s stories use simple spoken words; adult fiction and news use more formal vocabulary, much of it from Pali and Sanskrit. Moving up means meeting a second vocabulary, so move gradually.
- Particles and pronouns. Dialogue in stories is full of the particles and pronouns that show who is speaking to whom and how politely, which textbooks often flatten. Notice them; they are the music of spoken Thai.
What stories will not do
Stories are input. They will not give you good tones or the right vowel length if you never hear yourself against a native speaker, and they will not make you a fluent speaker without speaking. Use them alongside pronunciation work and conversation, not instead of them, and let the reading carry the vocabulary load that drills carry badly.
References
- Elley, W. B., and Mangubhai, F. (1983). The impact of reading on second language learning. Reading Research Quarterly, 19(1), 53–67. doi:10.2307/747337
- Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.
- Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65. doi:10.1093/applin/aml048