Learning Language and Culture through Indigenous Knowledge: A Case Study of Teaching a Minority Language (Mon) in a Majority Language (Thai) School Setting

There are so many dialects and minority languages spoken in Thailand. The standard Thai is selected as an official language among those languages. Some of minority languages are endangered languages because they are at risk of falling out of use. Because of teaching Thai in school, the new generations of ethnic people do not use their ethnic languages in everyday life. Some of them cannot speak their ancestor language. According to this problem, some schools in Thailand bring an endangered language back and teach it in school to preserve that particular language. The aim of this paper is to observe and describe how an indigenous knowledge can be used to develop the knowledge of language and culture in teaching minority language, the Mon language spoken in Rajaburi province in central Thailand. The research data used in this paper were collected from the observation and in-depth interviews of teachers and students of Wat Muang School and also the local Mon-speaking people of Ban Muang district in Rajaburi province in central Thailand. The findings reveal that the well-organized curricular and class management which support both contents and students help the goal of study going successfully. There are so many medium used to teach language and culture. The most important thing is the medium of using indigenous knowledge. The local Mon-speaking people are sometimes invited to teach students in class and out of class. It has been found that this strategy can help to improve the ability of learning language and culture of the students. It also helps to solve many problems among teachers and learners to understand a minority language. By using indigenous knowledge, it can be used to teach not only the minority languages but also other languages in class with different cultures.