Redesigning the curriculum for English teachers
A. Chaedar Alwasilah, Bandung | Opinion | Sat, May 19 2012, 12:09 PM
Around 1 million out of 2.9 million teachers have taken a
PLPG program, or mandatory professional improvement program mandated by
the law. Selected LPTKs, or teacher-training universities, are tasked
with carrying out the program.
Annually around 300,000 teachers are certified and it will take another four years to certify all teachers in the country.
At
present there are around 130,000 English teachers, which is about 4.4
percent of the teacher population. There are only two English teachers
on average in every school, suggesting that one English teacher has to
handle 150 students (Hamied, 2011).
From 2009, through
Ministerial Regulation No. 10/2009 on the certification of teachers, the
Education and Culture Ministry requires all practicing teachers to hold
a teaching certificate from the government. The main reason is because
according to the previous law teachers did not necessarily hold a
bachelor degree.
In many private universities and colleges, the
enrollment of education majors has increased significantly and has
become a lucrative asset for 128 English language training institutions
throughout the country. Students’ motivation to be an English teacher is
indeed very high. However, motivation alone is not necessarily a
pathway to success. Equally important is what is taught to the
prospective teachers in pre-service training.
A survey was
conducted on two groups of EFL teachers, comprising 88 elementary
teachers in Jakarta and 200 junior secondary teachers living in Jakarta
and the West Java, and Banten provinces. The second group of respondents
were participants of the nine-day Teacher Certification Program in
September 2011, while the former were graduates of or were attending
PGSD, or four-year elementary school teacher education.
According
to the current policy, English is a mandatory local content subject for
grades 4-6. However, many schools introduce English to grades 1-3.
Despite the lack of resources, the show goes on to please parents. Most
elementary teacher respondents (58.0 percent) have neither English
backgrounds nor any training on English for young learners.
The
qualifications of secondary EFL teachers are better as they have the
following qualifications: Master’s degrees (4.2 percent), Bachelor’s
degrees (90.7 percent), and 3-year Diplomas (5.1 percent). However, at
the national level the picture is discouraging. As Prof. Hamied,
president of Indonesia’s TEFL (2011) has stated, only 35 percent of
English teachers are academically qualified to teach.
In reality,
they tend to faithfully follow available textbooks and LKS or student
work sheets, which are not necessarily professionally prepared. This is a
far cry from the spirit of the present school-based curriculum, which
requires teachers to be creative and resourceful in developing their own
instructional objectives and in managing the class.
The current
teacher certification program has improved salaries, yet failed to
improve teachers’ professionalism. Only 13.2 percent of them have
enhanced the quality of student learning.
Secondary teachers
mastered the following as part of their professionalism: (1) learning
materials (51.3 percent), (2) methods of teaching (16.7 percent), (3)
curriculum implementation (11.9 percent), (4) instructional technology
(10 percent), and (5) learning evaluation (9.7 percent).
This
suggests that for them, mastering English seems to be easier than
mastering methods of teaching, implementing the curriculum, using
instructional technology and conducting learning evaluation.
Apparently
for the respondents, who have taught at least five years, it is easier
to learn English than to learn methods of teaching.
However,
recent observations of PLPG teacher participants at the Indonesian
University of Education (UPI) in Bandung revealed that both junior and
senior secondary EFL teachers’ mastery of English as set in the standard
of content, remained weak, with an average TOEFL score of 400.
The
present PLPG program consists of 90 hours of training on the following
subjects: (1) teacher professional development, (2) review of English,
(3) teaching methodology, (4) workshop on (classroom) action research,
academic writing, learning material development, and (5) peer teaching.
The
inclusion of those subjects must have been based on a needs analysis.
By implication, teachers are generally weak at them and present
pre-service training at LPTKs has failed to equip them with sufficient
knowledge and practical know-how in those areas.
To develop
professionalism in EFL teaching, proficiency in English is crucial. So
is mastering the subject matter pedagogy. In other words, it is much
easier to learn English than to learn how to teach it. You cannot teach
what you do not know, and without subject matter pedagogy you cannot do
well.
Secondary EFL teachers believe that in-service training is
the most appropriate way of upgrading their professionalism, followed by
training to improve English proficiency. They are less interested in
obtaining a graduate degree than obtaining a teaching certificate
through the PLPG as mandated by the law.
It is clear that the
bedrock of EFL professionalism is teachers’ mastery of English and its
pedagogy. ELT trainings and EFL professional development programs should
emphasize these two aspects.
Secondary EFL teachers also
reported the following aspects as those that they had mastered the
least: (1) instructional technology (33.9 percent), (2) curriculum
implementation (28.2 percent), (3) methods of teaching (20.8 percent),
(4) EFL teaching materials (8.7 percent), and (5) learning evaluation
(8.4 percent).
This suggests that instructional technology is
the weakest area of EFL teaching followed by curriculum implementation
and methods of teaching. Alas, many EFL curriculum developers at LPTKs
have taken this issue lightly.
Prof. Watson, in his inspiring
response to my article in this daily (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 11) echoed
the same problems in pre-service training that existed 40 years ago.
New
branches of linguistics and literature and interdisciplinary approaches
to them are intellectually fascinating and selling the image.
Epistemologically, there is nothing wrong with them, but over teaching
them to prospective teachers of English as a foreign language at the
cost of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading and writing is
educationally misleading.
It seems that most faculty members in
the departments are English-minded, showing zero tolerance for
un-English subjects. There is no room for reviewing students’ mastery of
Indonesian language and local literature en route to English
literature. They would argue that anything Indonesian is to be taught in
the Indonesian language (education) department.
Watson and I
share the view that the prerequisite for learning a foreign language
well is first to have an excellent command of your own language.
Unfortunately,
neither writing nor reading are given the importance they deserve in
the current curriculum for Indonesian language teaching. How can you
expect Indonesian intellectuals to write articles in international
journals when they do not write well in their first language?
The writer is a professor at the Indonesia University of Education (UPI) Bandung and a member of the Board of Higher Education.
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