Who Ploy is
Ploy was born and raised in a small village outside Surin, in Thailand's Isan region, in a family that spoke Isan Lao and Thai at home. She taught herself English from cassette tapes starting at age nine — years before she ever had a real conversation with a native speaker. She remembers exactly how that felt: knowing hundreds of words and freezing the moment she had to say one out loud to a real person.
She became a teacher so that gap would close for the next generation. Today she's married to Ben Cunningham, raising three sons together in Chiang Mai, and still spends her days doing the thing she's always done best — sitting next to a kid who's scared to speak, and staying there until they're not.
"Tongues, like muscles, only get strong by being used. Ploy is a place where children can use theirs without anyone laughing."
From one classroom to two websites
Everything here started small: a laminated word list and a phone with a text-to-speech app, used with a handful of students in a village school. It worked. Kids who wouldn't say a word in front of the class would say it to a screen, over and over, until it felt normal in their own mouth. That loop — look · listen · speak — became the seed of two separate projects that now work together.
🦜 EnglishTeacher.com
The daily-practice half of the story. A free tool where kids build vocabulary and pronunciation one word at a time — now grown from a handful of flashcards into 2,900+ words across 81 topics, built for homework, self-study, and classroom use anywhere in Thailand.
Practice with Ploy →★ USAEnglish.com
The performance half. Vocabulary is only useful once a student is brave enough to use it out loud, in public, in a full sentence. USAEnglish.com runs the Isan Storytelling Championship — a free, cash-prize English speaking competition touring eight cities across Northeast Thailand — for students who are ready for the next step past practice.
See the competition →The two sites are built for the same student at two different moments. EnglishTeacher.com is where a shy nine-year-old learns to say "elephant" without flinching. USAEnglish.com is the stage where, a few years later, that same student might stand in front of two hundred people in Surin and tell a five-minute true story in English for a ฿100,000 prize. One is quiet, private, repeatable practice. The other is a spotlight. Thailand's students needed both.
The story so far
A village classroom in Isan
Ploy starts using a simple listen-and-repeat drill with her students — no app, just a phone and patience. The students who practice daily outpace the ones who only study grammar, by a wide margin.
EnglishTeacher.com goes online
The classroom drill becomes a free website: press one button to hear a word, another to say it back. No login, no ads, no score that follows a child home. Just the loop, available on any phone.
USAEnglish.com and the Isan Storytelling Championship
Ben and Ploy launch USAEnglish.com to give practiced students somewhere to go next — a real stage, real judges, and real cash prizes for telling a true story in English. Founded in Surin, touring eight cities across the region.
2,900+ words and growing
EnglishTeacher.com expands from a handful of flashcards to 2,900+ words across 81 topics — animals, food, school, feelings, farming, festivals, and more — plus a dedicated space for teachers to turn any topic into homework.
Free forever
EnglishTeacher.com has no ads, no subscriptions, no accounts, and never will. If you find it useful — for your own kids, for a classroom, for a community center anywhere in Thailand — please use it. Tell other teachers. Tell other students. That's enough.
— With love from Isan 🇹🇭, Ploy & Ben Cunningham
👩🏫 Are you a teacher?
We built a dedicated page with homework ideas, printable word lists for all 81 topics, and how EnglishTeacher.com connects to USAEnglish.com speaking-competition prep and mentor practice.
Visit the Teachers page →