| 摘要: | The number of Thai students taking Chinese language either locally or abroad either in China or Taiwan has tripled over the past 5 years. In addition, the Thai government is pushing even more students to take up the language for the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015. The rise of Mandarin language and its popularity in Thailand has led to a shortage of teachers. Currently, around 1 million Thai students are learning Chinese, but there are only 1,200 native speaking teachers. To facilitate elementary schools, high schools, and Universities, The Education Ministry says that the number of teachers needs to be triple.
In response to the rising demand, the Thai government has laid out plans to bolster the teaching of Mandarin in schools and sending students to study in China is one of the viable options to meet the shortage. There are many Thai students wish to study graduate degrees in the Chinese counties, China and Taiwan. They have various choices to choose and many decisions to make.
This paper would be the first research about motivation factor attracts Thai student’s intent to study in China or Taiwan. It will examine factors that motivate Thai student to study in host country (China and Taiwan). It describes a ‘push-pull’ model motivating the student’s desire to seek overseas education and influencing the decision process in the selection of a final study destination. Drawing on the findings from research studies undertaken in Thailand, the paper examines influencing factor of host country selection such as the importance of knowledge and awareness of host country, the important of cost issues, and the importance of environment issues, the important of social link, geographic proximity and relationship between countries. Additional, research will compare the factors influencing choice between China and Taiwan. Based on these findings the paper argues that Cost Issue and Quality of education within the following host country serve to ‘pull’ Thai students who want to study abroad the most. |
