Lived experiences of Filipino teachers teaching English in a bilingual and English program in government schools of Thailand: a phenomenology inquiry

Bilingual education is recognized worldwide as an effective pedagogical approach to learning a new language. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of Filipino teachers teaching in a Bilingual and English Program in government schools of Thailand. The research employed semi-structured interviews for data collection. The participants were 26 Filipino teachers who were teaching English and other subjects under the BMA (Bangkok Metropolitan Administration) English and Bilingual Project in Bangkok. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants who shared common experiences of teaching in a Bilingual and English Program in both primary and secondary schools in Bangkok. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and organized into various themes based on the research purpose. The emergent results were categorized into five main themes, such as (1) positive experience, (2) negative experience, (3) sources of employment information in Thailand, (4) solutions and (5) motivations. The results revealed that those who were working in the Bilingual and English Program had various opinions mainly relating to the lack of systematic criteria of assessing students’ performance, large class size, salary issues, attitudinal and behavioral problems of Thai students, language problems, problems of teaching materials and teaching pedagogies.