Competency-based language instruction in speaking classes: its theory and implementation in Indonesian contexts

The competency-based curriculum as endorsed by the Department of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia has recently been implemented nationwide from elementary to high schools in the country. It is claimed that by improving syllabi, materials, and activities or by putting a more emphasis on learners’ autonomy, more effective language learning will take place. However, such an approach may also be counter-productive as it emphasizes the outputs more than the inputs. Another problem may arise as learners’ language performance may also entail teaching preparations in that teachers are obliged not only to be knowledgeable of the topics discussed, but also to be skillful and creative in preparing the materials. The implementation of this approach then becomes more complicated, especially when related to the learners’ culture. The features of this language instruction seem to be contradictory to Indonesians’ cultural values and beliefs which are reflected in the forms of total obedience, the unquestioning mind, the concept of the old know all, and the teachers can do no wrong. Due to the above barriers, this study intends to explore and evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of this instruction in speaking classes in Indonesian contexts. It will specifically attempt to assess the extent to which closed and open tasks can affectively be accomplished and with what degree of success the students acquire natural language use

Teach my children English: Why parents wants English teaching for their children

This paper describes parents’ reasons for sending their children to an English language course, their expectations from the English language instruction, and the disadvantages they perceive in getting their children to learn English at their early ages. A small-scale exploratory survey using questionnaires was conducted among 46 parents whose children learn English at a private course. The results indicate that the majority of the parents are generally aware of the practical values of providing English instruction for their children and hardly perceive any disadvantages in this early English learning. Also, they expect English instruction to enable their children to perform the four language skills, notably speaking. Implications for the young learners’ first language as well as the teaching of young learners are then presented. These may offer teachers, parents, and other researchers some important points to consider

The learning strategies of Taiwanese university students: English majors versus non-English majors and males versus females

This study intends to investigate the learning strategies of Taiwanese university students. Two groups of students – 66 English majors and 86 non-English majors – were the subjects of the study. They responded to the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford, 1989) of ESL or EFL version of 50 questions. The responses were calculated through statistical analysis in terms of frequency, mean, and standard deviation. It was found that all subjects use compensation strategies most frequently, and affective ones most infrequently. When English majors were compared with non-English majors, the former used learning strategies more frequently than the latter. Similarly, when gender was compared, female students tended to apply learning strategies more frequently than male students did. The top one and two strategies employed by all subjects were “If I can’t think of an English word, I use a word or phrase that means the same thing,” and “To understand unfamiliar English words, I make guesses.” The strategy least used was “I write down my feelings in a language learning diary.” The paper concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of the findings

Negotiation of meaning in communicative tasks

The adoption of task-based teaching in Indonesia classrooms has not been widely accepted for two major grounds. First, teachers seem to cast some doubts as to what degree such an approach can contribute to their students’ language development. Second, classroom management issues, such as discipline and noise become another challenge to cope with. While these issues deserve serious attention, teachers’ unwillingness to venture the use of tasks seems to put their awareness of the learning process at stake. It is through task-based teaching, students’ language development can be nurtured. This study is an attempt to probe the benefits of using two types of communicative tasks: picture comparison and picture drawing. The study involving two female Taiwanese native speakers learning English found that the interactional mechanisms created through a task and, negotiation of meaning provided a potentially rich forum for students’ language development. There are at least two prime elements accounting for this benefit. First, the type of direct indicators employed by the student creates linguistic urgency fostering the limit of their language capacity, and the use of embedded negotiation of meaning promotes students’ active involvement. Second, one way communicative tasks, to some degree, can yield greater opportunities for students to negotiate, thus enriching acquisition

Developing theories of teaching academic Indonesian to non-language majors: Ways of collecting and analyzing data

Writing is the skill most neglected in language education in Indonesia.  High school graduates in general are not ready to write academic Indonesian, let alone academic English. This paper discusses practices of teaching Indonesian at pre-college and college levels, theories and practice of writing, and language versus non-language specialists as writing instructors. The objectives of this paper are to demonstrate that: (1) different techniques of data collection generate different types of data, (2) the more data you have, the better you triangulate the findings, and (3) the quality of data is not only determined by its collecting techniques, but also by its relevance with research objectives. In this paper, I want to share the methodology of several studies on teaching writing at college levels I have conducted in the last eight years in English and non-English departments in Indonesia. The studies have revealed the following: (1) language education has failed to provide pre-college students with fundamentals of academic writing, (2) freshman Indonesian should be focused on developing academic or technical writing, (3) the success of teaching academic writing at college levels is dependent on the success of teaching writing at pre-college levels, (4) non-Indonesian language lecturers have the potential to be empowered to teach academic writing in non-language departments, (5) ethnic literature-based writing has the potential to revitalize the ethnic literature, and (6) collaborative writing including peer reviewing and teacher-student conferencing has been effective for coping with big classes of writing

Why we should teach grammar: Insights for EFL classroom teachers

Controversies about whether or not to teach grammar still reign in the current language pedagogy. Those who are against grammar teaching hold the view that grammar should not be taught since grammatical features can be acquired unconsciously in a natural setting. The protagonists of grammar teaching, however, argue that grammatical features need to be taught in order to facilitate the process of acquisition. Without questioning the legitimacy of the fact that grammatical features can be acquired unconsciously, this article argues that formal instruction is needed particularly in EFL contexts. Given this argument, the article addresses three important questions: (1) On what theoretical grounds should grammar teaching be based? (2) When should grammar instruction be given? and (3) How should grammar be taught

Corpus linguistics and the study of English grammar

This paper describes how corpus-based analyses can be employed for the study of English grammar, with a focus on case studies taken from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE). Two major themes are developed: 1) the kinds of unexpected findings about language use that result from corpus-based investigations, and 2) the importance of register for any descriptive account of linguistic variation. Three case studies are presented: one focusing on the use of words (i.e., the most common verbs in English); the second focusing on the use and distribution of grammatical forms (i.e., the relative frequency of simple, progressive, and perfect aspect in English); and the third describing how lexis and grammatical structure can interact in complex ways (i.e., showing how verbs with the same valency patterns can have strikingly different preferences for particular valencies). In all three cases, the paper argues for the centrality of a register perspective, showing how the patterns of use vary dramatically from one register to another