Built in a village classroom in Surin
สร้างในห้องเรียนหมู่บ้าน อำเภอรัตนบุรี จังหวัดสุรินทร์
Made by a non-profit, not for a market. Everything on this site was made because a class of Thai children needed it on a Tuesday morning and nothing that existed fitted.
Who makes this
How it is set up. ESLteacher.com is one of the sites run by USAEnglish. USAEnglish is a non-profit program. Registration is pending; the numbers will be published here the day they are issued. Neither of us takes a salary; the non-profit reimburses our costs and nothing more. Until then, write to ben@usaenglish.com and we will tell you where the filing stands.
The gold medal that started all of this
On November 18, 2010, at Ban Han Hee School in Rattanaburi, a primary-school girl stood up and told a story in English. She won gold.
The competition was งานศิลปหัตถกรรมนักเรียน, the Student Arts and Crafts Competition, run every year by Thailand's education service areas. Nobody invented it for her. It has run in Isan schools for decades, and every year children in villages with no library and no native speaker stand up and tell stories in a language they have only ever heard from a teacher doing her best.
The girl's name on that certificate is Ploypailin Moonsri. She teaches English now, in the village schools around Rattanaburi.
Sixteen years later I teach at the same school. The competition still runs and the children still stand up. What was missing was never the competition — it was a reason for a family to decide it mattered enough to let a child spend an evening practicing instead of working.
So that is what the non-profit adds. The schools run the competition as they always have; USAEnglish.com puts prize money behind it, a stage, and an audience. Everything else we build exists to get a child ready for that moment.
Why Thailand only
There are dozens of ESL worksheet tools and dozens of job boards. Almost all of them are built for everywhere, which means they are built for nowhere in particular. They give a Thai teacher a worksheet aligned to US Common Core, a translation with no pronunciation help, and grammar notes written for a Spanish speaker.
A Thai child drops final consonants, does not inflect for tense or plural, has no articles in her first language, and has spent years hearing English filtered through Thai phonology. That is a specific set of problems with specific solutions, and a tool that tries to serve forty countries cannot address any of them properly.
So this site does one country. Prathom 1 to Matthayom 6, the Basic Education Core Curriculum, Thai and Isan first languages, classrooms of forty-five with one shared phone. Narrow on purpose.
What we promise
- Free forever. Not a free tier, not a trial. There is no paid version and there is no plan to make one.
- No login, ever. A teacher can send forty children here without collecting a single consent form.
- No student data. Nothing a child does is stored on our servers. Nothing is sold, because there is nothing to sell.
- Nothing costs a teacher money. The worksheets are free, the resources are free, and the job board on the home page is free to read and free for a school to post to.
- We say what we do not know. Where a tool has a limit, the site says so rather than claiming otherwise.
The other sites
Five sites, one classroom behind all of them — this is one; the other four are below, with the two pages of this site that people ask for most.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, a bug, or a request for your school — write and it comes straight to my inbox. If something on this site is wrong, telling me is a favor.
Send a message → or email ben@usaenglish.com