Essay dan Opini

Senin, 31 Oktober 2016

WHY 12 Years Learning English yet still Cannot Speak?

The finding of my current research indicates that there are two main big, let's say, "failures" that ELT in Indonesia still encounters in order to make L2 learners successfully and properly involved in an L1 discourse community.

First, it is found that many Indonesian L2 learners are not or less equipped by what so called "pragmatic competence", a competence to use a language appropriately in a particular context. As a result, the learners are often failed to produce contextually appropriate utterances that are used by native speakers in norms and by default. The learners tend to utilise Indonesian's customised linguistic competence and transfer/translate it to L2/English literally. Therefore, a two-way-meaningful interaction among non-native and native speakers or multi-lingual interlocutors is rare to happen. They may be linguistically correct, but contextually inappropriate.

Second, I found out that Indonesian learners are not or less exposed by what so called "authentic materials", materials used in a daily life, not made for the purpose of teaching/learning, and are brought into classroom teaching context. I have come up with a conclusion that this issue is the main factor why Indonesian L2 learners are lack of pragmatics competence mentioned previously. Why has it come that way? The main purpose of employing authentic materials in a language classroom is to diminish and eliminate the gap between the classroom and the daily life. Therefore, a set of transactional conversations that occur in a daily interaction should have been fundamentally, prominently, and paramountly exposed to the L2 learners so that they would have understood how the language is used in reality. Instead of drilling the learners to a number of lexical morphologies and syntaxes, it will be better to make up a classroom to become a number of different discourse settings such as airport, bus station, market, mall, and many other settings that the learners may often face in daily life. No worries, the grammar teaching still can be applied but by switching it from "Focus on Forms" to "Focus on Form".

To sum up, there are several things to evolve and innovate within the development of ELT in Indonesia. The thing that I highlight is the notion of ELT teacher's preparation training. After looking through several courses that ELT department in several universities in Indonesia offer, I found out that there is no such specific "intercultural pragmatics" course to be mandatorily taken by pre-service teachers in Undergraduate levels while I found almost all post-graduate levels do offer this course. Notwithstanding this reality is quite unfortunate, the revolution of ELT curriculum designed by the Ministry of Education could be another solution considering the demand of highly proficient English communicative competence is extremely high in this globalised world.