Unit 4 · Vocabulary and description.

By the end Use six precise emotion words in place of happy, sad, angry and scared.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 6 min — The four words. Write happy, sad, angry, scared. Ask for the story moments where they used them. Then ask: what did your body actually do at that moment?
2. 12 min — Build from the body. Elicit and teach in pairs: relieved / ashamed, proud / embarrassed, nervous / furious, lonely / grateful, disappointed / hopeful, exhausted / restless. Twelve words, chosen because they appear in real stories.
3. 8 min — Swap. Students replace every one of the four basic words in their own story with a precise one, or with the body detail instead.
4. 4 min — Read two aloud. The class says which version they believe.

To finish Homework: write down the Thai word for what you felt, then find its nearest English word.

By the end Describe weather and season accurately enough to place the story in the Thai year.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 6 min — Three seasons, not four. Thailand has hot, rainy and cool. English textbooks teach spring, summer, fall, winter. Teach the Thai year in English: the hot season, the rainy season, the cool season, and the names of the months.
2. 10 min — Build the bank. Elicit: humid, sticky, pouring, drizzle, flooded, dusty, dry, cracked earth, burning, breeze, mist, smoke haze. Concrete, local words.
3. 7 min — Place the story. Each student writes one sentence putting their story in a season, using one word from the bank.
4. 2 min — Why it matters. Weather is the fastest way to put a listener inside a place they have never been.

To finish Homework: describe today's weather in three English sentences.

By the end Name family relationships precisely in English, including those English handles poorly.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 8 min — The mismatch. Thai distinguishes older and younger siblings (พี่ / น้อง) and specifies which side a grandparent is from. English does not. Teach the workarounds: my older sister, my younger brother, my mother's mother, my father's older brother.
2. 10 min — Map the family. Each student writes the English for the five relatives who appear in their story.
3. 8 min — The ones with no word. Discuss what to do with terms that do not translate — ป้า, ลุง, น้า, อา. Teaching point: use the Thai word once and explain it in five words. Judges find this interesting rather than confusing.
4. 4 min — Practice the explanation. In pairs, say the Thai term and the five-word gloss.

To finish Homework: write the English for every person in your story.

By the end Describe food and a market so a listener can smell it.

You need Whiteboard. Ideally a real market visit.

1. 5 min — The trap. 'Delicious' tells a listener nothing. Ban it for this lesson.
2. 12 min — Build the bank. Elicit and teach: sour, salty, bitter, sweet, spicy, smoky, fermented, grilled, sticky, crunchy, charred, fresh. Then the market: stall, vendor, bucket, ice, haggle, scoop, weigh, wrap, plastic bag, motorbike.
3. 10 min — One dish, five lines. Each student writes five sentences about one dish their family makes, without the word delicious.
4. 3 min — Read aloud. The class votes on which one made them hungry.

To finish Homework: describe what you ate tonight in five sentences.

By the end Use accurate English for farming and rural life instead of vague approximations.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 8 min — Build the bank. rice paddy, seedling, transplant, harvest, thresh, mill, husk, buffalo, plow, irrigation, dike, sack, yield, drought, debt, moneylender, middleman, fertilizer, tractor.
2. 10 min — The verbs matter most. plant, flood, drain, cut, dry, carry, sell. Practice each in a sentence about their own family.
3. 8 min — Fit to the story. Students insert three of these into their draft, replacing a vaguer word.
4. 4 min — Dignity. A quiet but important note: describe the work accurately and without apology. Many students have been taught to be embarrassed about farming. A precisely described life is not a poor one.

To finish Homework: ask a parent or grandparent to name three tools they use, and find the English.

By the end Describe a journey to or within a city using concrete travel vocabulary.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 6 min — Build the bank. songthaew, bus station, overnight bus, platform, ticket, luggage, traffic, skytrain, escalator, crossing, fare, get off, get on, transfer, lost.
2. 8 min — The arrival moment. Many Isan stories contain a first arrival in Bangkok. Practice it: what you saw first, what was loud, what you could not find.
3. 8 min — Write it. Five sentences about a journey the student has actually made.
4. 3 min — Contrast. Put a village sentence next to a city sentence. The contrast is what a story runs on.

To finish Homework: describe the longest journey you have taken, in five sentences.

By the end Say numbers, money and times of day accurately and out loud.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 8 min — The hard part is saying them. Write 15 and 50, 13 and 30, 1,900 and 19,000. Thai speakers and English listeners both mishear these. Drill the stress: fif-TEEN versus FIF-ty — the -teen numbers take the stress on the second syllable, the -ty numbers on the first. That one difference is the whole problem.
2. 8 min — Baht. 'Three hundred baht', not 'three hundred bahts'. 'Fifteen thousand', not 'one five thousand'. Practice the amounts that appear in their own stories.
3. 8 min — Time. half past six, quarter to five, six in the morning, midnight. Then the Thai six-hour clock problem: practice converting ห้าโมงเย็น to five in the afternoon.
4. 4 min — In the story. Each student checks every number in their draft and says it aloud once.

To finish Homework: say every number in your story aloud three times.

By the end Compare two things accurately using comparative and superlative forms.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 8 min — The three patterns. -er than, more … than, the …est. Drill only regular forms plus good/better/best and bad/worse/worst.
2. 10 min — Before and after. Every story has a before and an after. Students write three comparisons between the two: quieter, harder, further, more frightened.
3. 7 min — The common errors. 'more better', 'more easier', 'the most best'. Put them on the board and have the class correct them.
4. 3 min — One into the story. Each student puts one comparison into the story where the turn happens.

To finish Homework: write three sentences comparing your life now to five years ago.

By the end Use two or three idioms correctly, and know which ones to avoid.

You need Whiteboard.

1. 6 min — The risk. An idiom used wrongly is worse than no idiom. A story told plainly beats a story with a misfired phrase.
2. 10 min — Six safe ones. Teach only: make up my mind, keep my word, turn out well, look after, give up, from that day on. All common, all hard to misuse, all useful in a life story.
3. 10 min — Six to avoid. Show idioms students often reach for and get wrong or that date badly. Explain why, briefly.
4. 4 min — At most two. Each student may add a maximum of two idioms to the story.

To finish Homework: use one of the six in a sentence about your own life.

By the end Keep a personal vocabulary bank of words the student needs for their own story.

You need A notebook page per student, kept all term.

1. 6 min — Set it up. Four columns: English, Thai, how I say it, where I use it in my story. The fourth column is what makes it stick.
2. 10 min — Seed it. Each student enters the twenty words their own story actually needs. Not a textbook list — their list.
3. 8 min — Trade five. In pairs, students read five words to each other. Anything useful gets copied across.
4. Ongoing — Two a day. Two new words a day for ten weeks is 140 words, all of them ones they chose. That is more usable vocabulary than most terms produce.

To finish Ongoing homework for the rest of the course: two words a day.