Teacher Discussion Forums

... smartphone ubiquity, with Google Maps, GPS, etc?

Locals here in Thailand love helping straying tourists even with their limited English.

But as the technology for taking people to their destinations constantly improves and makes visitors more independent, is the human side of giving, supplementing or confirming directions no longer a top-10 topic for pre-intermediate learners, even in a heavily-tourist-infused place like Bangkok??

Not everyone has a smart device and even if they do the road layout or internal building layout can be hideous complicated with you not sure which road you need to enter. There is also incompleteness in those smartmaps- things not in the right place. My father-in-law used a telephone number to drive to a farm and the farm's entrance was near where near the place that the GPS map told him to.