TEACHING CHALLENGES IN INDONESIA: MOTIVATING STUDENTS AND TEACHERS’ CLASSROOM LANGUAGE

Yuyun Yulia. (2013). Teaching Challenges In Indonesia: Motivating Students And Teachers’ Classroom Language : Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics. 3(1). 1-16. This paper critically describes the main challenges English language teachers face in teaching in Indonesia. It is part of a larger study evaluating the teaching of EFL English in Indonesian junior high schools. The study is to analyze two main challenges teachers face in structuring teaching and learning in class in the Indonesian context, namely, student motivation and teacher’s classroom language. English as the most important global language has become a compulsory subject in developing countries such as Indonesia. The teaching of English language currently is very marketable to students at all levels of education. In response to this, the government has been trying to develop the English language curriculum in order to cater for the needs of Indonesian society. Teachers, for example, have been trained through pre-service and in-service programs to achieve good quality teaching as well as developing learning materials in the form of textbooks or online access. In brief, much effort has been devoted to improve English language teachers’ capacity and students’ knowledge. This change impacts on the school management as well as the curriculum. In terms of language teaching, for example, due to the many vernacular languages such as Javanese, Balinese and Sundanese with over 400 languages spoken in Indonesia and 88 percent using them as their first language (Nababan, 1991), the teaching of the local languages becomes the target of each district. The subjects of the research were students and English teachers in twelve randomly selected junior high schools in government and private schools in five districts in Yogyakarta Province under the Ministry of National Education (420 schools) and the 5 Ministry of Religious Affairs (85 schools). A total of 4849 students attended these twelve schools with 427 teachers, including 47 English language teachers. A questionnaire survey of both teachers and students as well as focus group discussions of students together with interviews of 24 English language teachers combined with class observation were used to gather the data. The questionnaire and focus group data describe students’ motivation while classroom observation describes the real situation of English language teaching. The questionnaire administered to the students examined two issues, their motivation in learning English and the media and materials used by the teachers. The results show that students’ motivation is more of an instrumental motivation, due to the requirements of the mandated national examination though English now is a global language and the 2006 curriculum targets communicative competence. On the other hand, the data indicated that teachers found English difficult to use in class. The classroom instruction was conducted mostly in the low variety of Bahasa Indonesia and in Javanese. The teachers claimed that it was due to students’ low motivation; in fact, the students’ eagerness to listen to the teachers as the models of English language expressions was good. Teachers need to motivate students to learn English by improving their teaching techniques as well as their speaking competence in class to achieve student integrative motivation as English is valuable for them. Teachers in their key roles must be able to motivate students to learn English in an interesting way. Over two decades, the English language teaching showed significant paradigm with the term of communicative competence. In fact, such cannot easily be found in Indonesian classrooms. The English language that should be targeted as the teachers’ classroom instruction needed by students were difficult to realize. The teachers seemed to dominate the class with their ‘language mixture’ and students tended to keep silent. When they did sometimes respond, it was in Bahasa Indonesia and the Javanese language. The problems faced by teachers on the ground varied and were intertwined. So, professional collegial initiatives supported by the district, provincial and central governments should be conducted to improve teachers’ professionalism and the knowledge they gain from training can be implemented in class to raise students’ motivation to learn English. In summary, teachers need to participate actively to improve their teaching professionalism through pre-service and in-service training though such a situation is not easily realized. It could be due to lack of training from the district, teachers’ time availability, the location where training is conducted, and, finally, government funding issues.