“If the teacher comes to my house, I will kill the teacher and feed him to the chickens”: Radio Tales as a Medium for Developing Listening Skills to Enhance Understanding of Thai Sentence Structure Sequencing among Ethnic Students in Nan Province Who Are Non-Native Thai Speakers

Abstract

This study examines the challenges related to Thai sentence structure among ethnic minority students in Nan Province, Thailand, whose first languages are not Thai. It also explores the potential of community-broadcast radio folktales as an instructional medium for enhancing learners’ understanding of Thai syntactic order. Findings indicate that early primary students from the Lua, Hmong, Mien, and Mlabri groups commonly struggle with sentence sequencing, particularly in constructions involving serial verbs and negative structures. These difficulties arise from the syntactic patterns of their native languages, which differ substantially from Thai, leading to unfamiliarity and confusion when encountering the Thai linguistic system. As a result, the students tend to exhibit low performance on national standardized assessments. The study further reveals that radio folktales disseminated through village loudspeaker systems effectively improve students’ listening comprehension of Thai sentence patterns. Because these folktales are culturally familiar and widely recognized within the communities, they function both as pedagogical materials and as supplementary listening resources outside the classroom. The program comprises five components: 1) an introductory segment, 2) a storytelling segment, 3) a vocabulary-building segment, 4) a sentence-ordering practice segment, and 5) a concluding moral message. The use of radio folktales therefore represents a promising and culturally responsive approach for strengthening ethnic minority students’ communicative abilities and foundational Thai literacy skills.