Dear Parents and Guardians,
I hope your children have had a good week. This week we celebrated Wai Kru. I used this as an opportunity to address concerns that have been raised by parents about students using inappropriate language when speaking in Thai. Whilst many parents see the root of this issue as being about our policy on the use of English, which is similar to the policies used at other international schools (in fact, the changes that we made emerged from discussions in the Heads of Upper School meetings at other British Schools including Harrow, Shrewsbury and Pattana), we see this as a behaviour issue.
To help to begin to address this, I would like to share with you the full text of my speech that I gave at the Upper School Wai Kru ceremony:
Good morning, students and staff. Today, we participate in Wai Kru, a tradition rooted in respect, gratitude, and the pursuit of wisdom. As we look ahead to the rest of the academic year, I want you to know that the staff and leadership team are fully committed to supporting your ambitions, your growth, and your success. For our new teachers, this will be your first time experiencing this wonderful part of Thai culture, and I hope you enjoy it today.
Whilst Wai Kru is a beautiful ceremony of showing respect, true respect cannot be expressed in a single ceremony once a year if it is being ignored in the hallways every day. This year, I feel I need to address an issue directly which some parents have reported to me: the use of swear words, particularly when speaking Thai by some students. When you use vulgar {bad} language, you undermine our core school values. How you speak reflects your character and the standards of our community. When you swear, you let us all down. Wai Kru is meaningless if we show respect to our teachers during a ceremony, but use offensive language in front of them by lunchtime.
Most of you do not need to hear this; you are polite, respectful and model students, and you are as annoyed by this issue as I am. However, there is a small minority who do need to hear this, so this is directed to them. Casual swearing will not be normalised, excused, or ignored. It will be met with firm, direct disciplinary action. This behaviour is not welcome here. We hold you to a high standard because we respect your potential as leaders. We have high aspirations for your time at DBS and your future afterwards. Let’s ensure our daily language matches the honour of today's tradition and sets a high standard for the year ahead.
Let’s work together to build a community that we can all be proud of, where everyone feels welcome, and all of our actions are built on respect.
The school will take strong and escalating disciplinary action with students who are found to be swearing, be that in Thai, English or another home language. Often when parents raise this issue with us, they speak about students anonymously. To help us address this, we need parents to support us by giving us details about specific incidents that we can follow up on. Together, we can begin to shift this culture.
Going back to why we allow students to use their first language in social time, our approach, and the approach of our competitors, is based on research.
Arguments in favour of flexible multilingualism
- Translanguaging & Socio-Emotional Well-Being: Forcing monolingualism outside the classroom can create linguistic anxiety and social distance. Allowing students to use their primary language (L1) during unstructured social time honours their cultural identity, facilitates deeper peer bonding, and improves overall school engagement.
- Affective Filter Hypothesis: Language acquisition drops sharply when stress or self-consciousness is high. Policing language during personal downtime keeps students' "affective filter" elevated. Permitting L1 during breaks allows students to relax, lowering anxiety so they are more mentally receptive during formal English instruction.
- Linguistic Interdependence: Academic language proficiency relies on a shared conceptual foundation across languages. Allowing primary language social interaction does not impair academic English acquisition; cognitive depth in a student's native language directly supports academic concept development in their second language.
Arguments in favour of monolingualism (English only)
- Output & Time-on-Task Hypotheses: Language fluency scales directly with active target-language output. We have considered this, which is why we insist on English only in lessons (with some accommodation for students explaining a concept to peers and translating terminology)
- Interpersonal vs. Academic Skill Imbalance (BICS vs. CALP): Restricting English strictly to lessons develops Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) but starves Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS). Considering this, we felt that there are plenty of opportunities for social English development in other areas, and we still encourage English to be used for this purpose.
- Minority Student Exclusion: Studies on international school demographics caution that when a single native language dominates non-academic spaces, the non-native minority frequently experiences social isolation during unstructured hours. This is the area which concerns us most and is probably the strongest argument against our current policy.
It is also worth considering what the school environment was like under our old policy. When we used to insist on English during break and lunch, we had the same amount of Thai being spoken, but the approach led to much toxic confrontation and complaints from a significant proportion of the parent body that we were demonising Thai speakers. Our current policy has been in place for 3 years and, on the whole, has worked better, but this year, we have seen a shift in behaviour in some areas, not just in the use of swear words but also in the use of Gen Z neo-slang. This is something that we are beginning to address.
I hope this helps to clarify and assure you that we are taking action in relation to this behaviour issue.
Have a nice weekend
Jonny Liddell
Headmaster
