Translation as a tool to teach English to Thai learners

บทคัดย่อ

           The article aims to describe the use of translation as a tool to teach English to Thai learners, and to help them learn English better. A translation approach is often held by many not as necessary and important because they view that the main purpose of learning English nowadays is a communicative one.  As result, many people have overlooked this approach. However, translation still has a very important role to play as far as learning English is concerned.  The vital point is that the teacher of translation has to be tactful in planning and selecting what to teach. The teacher is to be able to combine translation with other disciplines such as reading, applied linguistics, and semantics so that learners can obtain maximum profits in a learning process.  The teacher should focus only on the key points which are useful and relevant to learners’ learning development.   A grammatical explanation should be done only if necessary.  A good way to encourage learners to improve their learning potential is through a short, but frequent exercise. Last but not least, learners should be taught to learn new words based on a lexical field and context clues.