English Camp at Watpranonnongpheung School

Math camps. Computer camps. Physics camps. Outdoors camps. Why not English camp? Hard for a farang (westerner speaking English) to get your head around. Think again. There are six billion of us on the earth. A minority of that group speaks English, fast becoming the language of choice for commerce, travel, many forms of prosperity.

Dr. Pearl's undergraduate ESL methods class for its third time traveled to a rural elementary school to spend the morning at English Camp. This wonderful invention is meant to teach children, this time fourth and sixth graders, simple English words and sentences. In the three hours I was there, I witnessed about 50 children broken down into four groups to rotate through four games.


Among the games were charades, bingo, and find the letter in the pile of strach and make a word out of the found letters. From the laughter and smiles of the children, I'd say the venture was a success.

One of my TESOL colleagues commented at lunch when I returned from Camp that the lack of teacher training for and the paucity of the actual English instruction destines most of these children to the most minimal fluency in English. This might be different in some suburban and urban schools.


I was wondering how large the English Camp idea is and googled it. Not too surprisingly, there are many all over the world suited for many different economic levels and with various personalities. One that caught my eye is called Dragonfly English Camp. Its web literature reads:

A Dragonfly English Camp package provides your students with the trip of a lifetime to one of our partner resorts and hotels. We have carefully selected Thailand’s best English Camp locations where we know that out students will be happy and well taken care of.
We have locations by the sea, in the hills and in other popular tourist destinations to choose from depending on the style of camp that you plan on running. We also cater for many levels of budget starting with the large dormitory style accommodation which anybody can enjoy ranging up to the 5* hotel style accommodation which provides your students with exceptional luxury.