A child can talk easily at break and still lose marks on a history paper. The distance between those two things is academic language, and academic language is taught, one student at a time.
What is
EAL support is one-to-one teaching for a student who studies every subject in English while speaking another language at home. The work is academic language: the vocabulary of science and history papers, the command words that decide marks, and the sentence patterns a Thai speaker has to build deliberately.
Key Points
One tutor, one student, working on the paper the school has already set. Nothing generic is handed out.
The tutor travels to you and opens the student's own marked work: a returned essay, a past paper, a set text with three chapters left.
The same teaching with the draft on screen, so a paragraph gets rebuilt sentence by sentence while the student watches it happen.
Siblings or two classmates entered for the same syllabus in the same school year, which turns speaking practice into something with a purpose.
One city, two school systems running in parallel, and an EAL learner may belong to either of them. Where the student starts is what decides the shape of the first term.
Early Years and lower Primary
The child understands the playground before the classroom. The first job is instruction language, the twenty or so phrases a teacher uses to run a lesson, because a child who misses those misses the lesson itself.
Subjects
Focus Areas
Year 3 through Year 6
Reading stops being about decoding and starts being about comprehension questions. This is where a Thai-speaking reader meets long sentences with embedded clauses, and where the first marks are quietly lost.
Subjects
Focus Areas
Year 7 through Year 9, and ม.1 through ม.3 in an EP stream
Eight or nine subject teachers each introduce their own register in the same week. Geography wants processes, history wants causes, science wants method written in the passive voice. The load is vocabulary breadth rather than grammar depth.
Subjects
Focus Areas
Year 10 and Year 11
Two years, one set of papers, and every mark now depends on reading a question correctly under time. An EAL student here usually knows the content. What costs marks is answering the question that was not asked.
Subjects
Focus Areas
Year 12 and Year 13
Coursework arrives: internal assessments, the extended essay, long structured essays. Writing at length in a second language is the real barrier, and it is a barrier of drafting habits rather than of vocabulary.
Subjects
Focus Areas
English-medium streams inside Thai state schools
A student here follows the B.E. 2551 core curriculum for basic education, revised in B.E. 2560, with several subjects delivered in English. The family is usually already paying above the standard fee, and the child is the most natural candidate to move up to an international syllabus later.
Subjects
Focus Areas
Six strands, each one aimed at a place where a second-language student loses marks on work they understood.
An EAL session is not the school's English lesson repeated more slowly. The English lesson teaches literature and language. EAL teaches the language every other subject assumes the student already has.
The words that appear in science, geography and history papers and almost nowhere else, learned together with the verbs and prepositions they travel with.
Every structured paper grades by command word. An answer that describes where the question asked for an evaluation is capped before the examiner reaches the content.
Thai and English build sentences differently, so certain errors are systematic. Naming them as system rather than as carelessness is what makes them fixable.
The paper is a subject paper, and the clock turns it into a reading test. Speed here is technique rather than talent.
Long writing is where coursework marks live: internal assessments, extended essays, structured essays worth a quarter of a paper.
Oral components, presentations and viva-style questions reward planned speech. Fluent chat and assessed speech are different performances.
Thailand had 207 international schools in 2019 and 249 in 2024 according to the private education commission figures reported by Nation Thailand. Every year of that growth adds families whose child now learns in a language that is not spoken at home.
The offer letter arrives in spring, the term starts in August, and the child moves from a Thai classroom into a timetable where science, maths and history all happen in English at once.
Recommended:
The child may have studied in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin or German, and now joins an English-medium class partway through a two-year course. The gap is specific and usually short.
Recommended:
Several subjects are already taught in English, the family is already paying above the standard fee, and the question is whether the English is strong enough to carry an international syllabus later.
Recommended:
Bangkok's international schools serve many households where the parents speak Japanese, Korean or Mandarin at home. The child's spoken English often runs well ahead of their written English.
Recommended:
International programmes at Thai universities set their own thresholds. Mahidol University International College publishes four routes: IELTS Academic at 6.0 with the Writing band also at 6.0, TOEFL iBT at 69 with Writing at 22, PTE at 50, or Duolingo at 100.
Recommended:
Language gains are slow to appear in a grade, so the note tracks the language itself. A parent should be able to see movement months before the report card shows it.
The paper, chapter or draft that was open on the table, named specifically, so the note can be matched against the school's own planner.
A single sentence the student wrote, and the same sentence rebuilt. One pattern per session, because a list of twenty corrections teaches nothing.
Between six and ten subject words, written with the verb and preposition they belong with, so they can be revised as phrases rather than as a list.
Usually a page or two the school has already set. Additional reading is only added when the timetable has room for it.
No score is invented. The note says what the student can now do unaided, and what still needs the tutor sitting beside them.
Every one of these shows up in the marking rather than in the conversation, which is why families usually find them at report time.
Challenge
Root cause
Conversational fluency arrives within a year or two. Academic language takes much longer, and it is invisible at the school gate. Maths grades hold, and history, geography and literature drop first, because those subjects are marked on written English.
Edulom solution
We read the actual returned essays rather than the grade summary, find whether the loss is content or expression, and teach whichever one it is. In most cases the content is there and the sentence carrying it collapses.
Challenge
Root cause
A six-mark question that says evaluate is answered with a description. The examiner sees correct facts and still applies the cap. Second-language students read for topic first, and the topic word is usually easier to see than the instruction word.
Edulom solution
Past questions get cut apart in the session. The student underlines the command word before touching the source, then writes the opening sentence that the command word demands, and only afterwards fills in the content.
Challenge
Root cause
A word memorised alone will not come back under exam pressure, because it was never stored with the words it lives beside. A student who knows investigation still writes do an investigation instead of carry out an investigation.
Edulom solution
Words are recorded as phrases with their verb and preposition attached, and each one reappears in a written sentence the same session and again two sessions later. Recall is built by use rather than by rereading.
Challenge
Root cause
Thai marks time with words such as แล้ว and จะ rather than on the verb, and it uses no article at all. So a and the and the past tense ending are not slips. They are grammar the student has to build on purpose, every sentence, until it becomes automatic.
Edulom solution
We name the pattern out loud, then drill it inside the student's own subject sentences rather than in exercises. The same rule practised in a science method paragraph transfers far better than a worksheet of isolated gaps.
Challenge
Root cause
Schools read spoken confidence as readiness, and withdraw the support just as the written demands are rising in Year 9 and Year 10. The drop appears one or two terms later, by which time it reads as a subject problem instead of a language one.
Edulom solution
Support tapers by evidence rather than by impression: the student marks their own writing against the criteria, and sessions thin out only when that self-marking matches the teacher's. Then we stop, and say so.
Challenge
Root cause
Reading a source in a second language takes longer, and the paper does not allow for that. A student who could answer every question answers four of six. This never appears in homework, because homework has no clock.
Edulom solution
Sessions are timed against real paper lengths. The student practises locating the answer sentence first, leaving unknown words unread, and abandoning a question at its time limit rather than after it.
None of these are fixed by more English in general. Each one is fixed by a specific habit practised on the student's own papers until it holds without prompting.
We are new in Thailand and we say so. What follows is how the service is built, which is the only thing a new provider can honestly offer.
Not a workbook we chose. The returned essay, the comment the teacher wrote, the paper with four marks missing. That is where the language problem is visible, and it is where the teaching starts.
IGCSE, IB and Cambridge A-Level mark differently, and an EP subject course differs again. The tutor who sits with your child has taught the specific course, and can name its assessment objectives.
Articles, plurals and tense endings are places where the two languages genuinely differ. A tutor who can name that difference saves months compared with one who repeats the English rule more slowly.
One error pattern shown before and after, the vocabulary set introduced, and what to read next. It is short by design, so it actually gets read on a weekday evening.
No headcount of tutors, no headcount of learners, no star score, no percentage of students who improved. Those figures would have to be invented, and inventing them at the exact moment a parent decides whom to trust is the worst possible place to start.
Say the word after session one or session two and a different tutor takes over without a fee. You also have the figure in writing before teaching starts, and it holds.
No Thai student has sat down with an Edulom tutor so far, which is why you will find no photographs and no star ratings below. The screening itself can be described, and it is specific to this subject.
Online suits EAL particularly well, because most of the work involves a document on screen. A draft can be rebuilt line by line while the student watches, and the annotated file stays with the family afterwards.
Eight khet carry most of the international-school families, and all eight are covered. Watthana holds the Sukhumvit and Thonglor side. Sathon and Bang Rak sit on the Sathorn and Silom office corridor, with Bang Kho Laem just beyond it on the riverside. Huai Khwang sits around Rama IX and Ratchada. Bang Na and Saphan Sung take the south-eastern edge, and Don Mueang the northern one. Assignment follows the rail line a tutor already travels on, and the journey is carried inside the per-session figure.
The answers below are about this programme specifically. Anything that depends on your child's school or year, ask us directly.
Bangkok runs two school ladders beside each other. The national one moves through อนุบาล, ป.1 to ป.6, ม.1 to ม.3 and ม.4 to ม.6, and its academic year begins around the middle of May before closing in March. The international one moves through Early Years, Primary, Key Stage 3, IGCSE in Year 10 and Year 11, and then IB Diploma or Cambridge A-Level in Year 12 and Year 13, with a year that opens in August and finishes in June.
An EAL learner can sit on either ladder, and the problem looks different on each. On the international ladder the child is surrounded by English all day and the difficulty is depth: the written register of each subject. On the national ladder, inside an EP, MEP or IEP stream, English is the medium for a few subjects only, so the difficulty is that English has to carry academic content for part of the day and then stop.
The calendars matter more than families expect. A child leaving a Thai school in March and starting an international school in August has four months in which the English can either drift or be built. A child arriving in January joins a class already halfway through a two-year IGCSE course, and the first job is triage rather than teaching.
EAL stands for English as an Additional Language. It describes support for a student learning academic content in English while using another language at home. It says nothing about ability. Some of the strongest mathematicians in a Bangkok international school are EAL students, and their maths grades often prove it while their history grades hide it.
The distinction that matters is between conversational language and academic language. Conversational language is what a child picks up in a playground, and it comes quickly. Academic language is the register of textbooks, papers and mark schemes, and it is dense, impersonal and full of nouns made out of verbs. Nobody acquires it by exposure alone, in any language.
That is why an EAL session is not the school English lesson taught again. The school English lesson has its own syllabus. EAL support works across the whole timetable, because the English that costs marks in a biology paper is biology English.
Thai and English build sentences with different machinery, and the places they differ produce errors that repeat with great regularity. Thai uses no articles, so a and the have to be added by decision rather than by ear. Thai does not mark plural on the noun, so the final s disappears under pressure. Thai marks time with separate words such as แล้ว and จะ rather than by changing the verb, so past tense endings drop out of long sentences first.
This regularity is useful. An error that repeats is an error with a rule behind it, and a rule can be taught in one session and then practised for a term. The alternative, which is treating each instance as carelessness, produces a student who is told to be more careful and has no idea what to be careful about.
The same applies to sound. Thai and English organise final consonants and consonant clusters differently, and the effect reaches written work through spelling. A student who hears and says a word one way spells it that way, and in science papers the spelling of technical terms is marked.
Practical Tips
For most EAL students in Bangkok the destination is either a university abroad or an international programme at a Thai university, and the second route has published thresholds worth knowing early. Mahidol University International College publishes four routes: IELTS Academic at 6.0 with the Writing band also at 6.0, TOEFL iBT at 69 with Writing at 22, PTE at 50, or Duolingo at 100. The BBA programme at Chulalongkorn sets a higher bar: IELTS Academic at 6.5, TOEFL iBT at 79, or a CU-TEP and Speaking combination at 101, plus a GPAX of 3.00. Chulalongkorn's Communication Design programme accepts IELTS 6.0, TOEFL iBT 79, CU-TEP 80, SAT EBRW 450, Duolingo 110 or CU-AAT Verbal 400.
Those thresholds change, so they are worth checking on the programme's own announcement rather than on any tutoring site, including this one. What does not change is the shape of the requirement: a writing sub-score is usually specified separately, and writing is the component EAL students need the longest run-up for.
One practical detail for planning. British Council and IDP both moved their Thai IELTS sittings onto computer on 22 March 2026. IDP's own city selector covers the capital plus Nonthaburi and Pathum Thani; in the north, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Khon Kaen and Udon Thani; in the east and north-east, Chonburi, Nakhon Ratchasima and Ubon Ratchathani; and in the south, Chumphon, Phuket and Hat Yai. A student who writes slowly by hand may find the computer format helps, and a student who plans essays in the margin will need a new habit.
None of these are exotic. They are the ordinary decisions that look reasonable at the time and cost a term or two later.
Mistakes & Solutions
Why join?
Send us the year group, the school's syllabus and one piece of marked writing. We will tell you honestly whether this is a language gap, a content gap, or nothing that needs a tutor at all.
Request an EAL tutor match
Register now, start anytime