This study is a literature study elaborating the actual condition of EFL teaching at primary schools in Indonesia. The fact shows that the culture of the students may hinder their confidence in speaking English. In terms of teachers, the core problem is that most of teachers teaching EFL at primary schools do not qualify as professional English teachers. To provide professional English teachers cannot be fulfilled in short time. Therefore, specific training on how to teach EFL well to teachers handling the subject at primary schools is badly needed.
Introduction
Introduction
Today, the global development is marked by the extensive use of English amongst most people across the globe. This fact has promoted the significance of English as a means of communication in almost all countries, including Indonesia. English is then assumed as being an important subject that must be taught both at formal and non formal education. In the context of Indonesia, English as a foreign language is a compulsory subject to be taught in all schools from junior high to senior high schools. At university level, English is one of general courses offered to almost all course of studies. Even in a number of elementary schools, English is offered as an elective subject or local curricular content. We have seen, however, that the proficiency in English of secondary school graduates still creates disappointment among teachers themselves as well as parents.
Besides, it has become public knowledge that some measurements have been taken by the Indonesian government to improve the quality of English teaching in secondary schools, irrespective of their effectiveness in actuality. Take for example the appearance of prescribed curriculum for English. Unfortunately, those are not prevalent in the English teaching for elementary schools. One of the possible reasons is that English is an elective subject, not a compulsory one. That is why its handling is not as serious as that for secondary schools. Until presently, for instance, there has been no any prescribed curriculum for the conduct of English teaching in elementary schools. This, to some extent, signifies the fact that English teaching and learning for elementary school has been somewhat ignored.
In addition, the English teaching for elementary schools has encountered numerous problems. One of which is the issue of exposure to English use in everyday life, which has been serious concerns of many people. This is one of the challenges that children learning English at elementary schools may come across with. Here in Indonesia, as an implication of positioning English as a foreign language, English is just learned in classrooms, not widely used as a means of communication by people across the regions. This lack of exposure makes children difficult to see English learning as being functional and useful for them. A second challenge has to do with the English writing system. Words in English are written differently as opposed to the way they are pronounced. Unlike English, Indonesia has phonetic writing system wherein the writings clearly reflect consistently the sounds. Children learning English would find English writing system confusing considering the fact that there is no direct one-to-one correspondence between the pronunciation of a word and its spelling.
Additionally, there has been a misleading misconception about how children learn language. Children have been wrongly assumed as being “a miniature of adults”, in which the way they learn a foreign language (including English) exactly the same as the way adults do. It resulted in a far-reaching problem. That is, teachers tend to approach the teaching-learning process in the same way as they would teach adults. This will impact what methods and techniques they use in the classroom. In actuality, children have their own world, which is far different from that of adults. Specifically, children have their own culture and learning preferences. That is, they generally learn by way of physical activities (i.e. hands on experiences). Besides, they have a relatively short attention span and they learn with the motive of meeting immediate goals (i.e. here and now principle). This uniquely child-like ways of doing things call for a certain methodological style, which emphasizes concrete activities, social interactions and series of little bits of action-based learning sessions packaged in various modes of delivery.
EFL at Primary Schools: A Bumpy Road
The teaching of EFL at primary schools takes a long history. During the New Order Government, the teaching of English was put aside due to premises on children’s psychological factors. It was suspected that if children are taught English earlier, they would become westernized. Beside that, it was assumed that their learning of national language, Bahasa Indonesia, would get distracted by English. In 1993, TEFLIN international seminar held in IKIP Padang displayed a controversy. Some supported the government’s argument. Others who supported the early teaching of English said that it would be better to teach the language at earlier age. This claim is based on a psycholinguistic theory stating that at the earlier age, children will much easier learn a foreign language compared to adults, especially prior to the process of lateralization in which the function of brain split into two: the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
The claim is seemingly supported by the natural approach (Krashen & Terrell, 1983) to the learning of oral language, which underlies the communicative method of teaching, implies acceptance of the traditional conception of the so called critical period (Lenneberg, 1967). This conception supposes that before puberty a learner can acquire the pronunciation of a language naturally by simple exposure to suitable models and by imitation.
However, this approach conflicts with the wide theoretical empirical base developed in the last 20 years in the field of speech perception. According to this the difficulties involved in learning the phonological component of a given L2 begin at one year of age, after which the phonological prototypes of the mother tongue act as perceptive magnets which “attract” the acoustically nearby sounds of the L2 (Khul & Iverson, 1985). The “equivalent classification” (Flege, 1987) of L2 sounds as L1 sounds blocks the formation of new L2 categories. The student develops inadequate perceptive objectives and pronunciation is adversely affected. The most difficult L2 sounds to discriminate and so produce are those with only slight differences from the L1 sounds, while the sounds furthest from the L1 with no real equivalent are the easiest to learn (Flege, 1995).
Regardless this controversy, there are several reasons why EFL teaching at primary schools get its importance. First, the need for English proficiency has touched every level of education. As an example, most learning resources are available in English, and we can only access them whenever we have an adequate proficiency in that language. Furthermore, English is the main language used in information technology which is badly needed today. Second, teaching EFL at primary schools will furnish students with a foundation to learn English at higher educational level. Other reasons why English should be taught earlier can be extracted as in the following:
· They find it easy to accept a new linguistic code because they are still learning their own.
· They find it easy to pronounce the new sounds for the same reason.
· They don’t feel self-conscious about sounding different.
· If they have a good experience of learning a language at this age, they will remember it with fondness, so will find it easier to learn languages later in life.
Concurrently, there are some emerging problems of EFL teaching in primary schools in our country. First, students often encounter problem in dealing with the way they speak the language which is very much influenced by their local languages. This makes them reluctant to use English in everyday life. When a student from Sunda tribe speaks English, he or she will produce Sundanese-accent English. A student from Batak tribe will produce Batak-accent English, and so on. Such phenomena lead to less confidence of students.
Besides, the quality standard set by schools is very high. Students are expected to achieve the level of near-native performance, otherwise they are regarded as bad English speakers. This perception is subject to change. Students do not need to be near-native. They may speak the language on their own convenience as long as it is communicative. An example of this can be seen from either Singaporeans, Malaysians, Indians, and the Philippines which are also multi cultured. They are not reluctant to speak English with their own dialects.
The other problem faced is the teachers teaching EFL at primary schools. Most EFL teachers at primary schools are not “real” English teachers. Real English teachers here mean the teachers who were majoring in English when they were at universities or colleges, and have been trained prior to their becoming professional teachers of English. Most teachers qualify only as class teachers or ‘guru kelas’ who are responsible for teaching all subjects at a certain grade students, including English. In teaching, they tend to rely on books provided by private publishers, since the government does not provide EFL syllabi yet for primary schools. As a result, the teaching of EFL cannot achieve satisfactory level.
To improve the EFL teaching, the government should provide professional English teachers at schools. This becomes prerequisite to the quality improvement of EFL teaching. However, due to financial challenge, the government is not able to recruit a large number of teachers equivalent to the number of primary schools. In addition, trained EFL teacher candidates for primary school are not adequately produced by universities. Most EFL teacher candidates are educated and trained to become Junior and Senior High School EFL teachers.
Teacher Training : A Proposed Key Action
Realizing the problems, particularly the problems on teachers, it is obviously that the class teachers teaching EFL have to be provided with specific training on EFL. They have to get a comprehensible understanding on English curriculum that best suit to their students. In addition, they need to have a reasonable level of English themselves to be able to teach the language. They need to be able to speak with some fluency in order to give the best example to their students. If the teachers themselves lack confidence, the students will not learn as well as they could.
No matter how the training will be formatted, however, as Cooper (2007) suggested that the teachers should be loaded with several key points. First, the emphasis should be on listening and speaking the language. Teachers should relate what they teach to what students already know in their own language; and never use the new language as the basis for teaching new concepts. They should use as much English as possible, talk to students all the time, so that they hear as much as possible. This gives them more opportunity to begin to understand the language and absorb its rhythm.
Another key point is that the lesson must be fun. The most important thing is that the students enjoy the lessons; they will not learn if they do not enjoy the lessons and the their motivation to learn is in order to participate in the lessons. Teachers may employ some techniques to make the teaching fun, such as using lots of visual aids; the more visual the better, so the students have a chance to understand even before they know the words. They may also use games to involve the students, or songs, because through these, the children learn vocabulary, grammar and the rhythm of the language without trying. Occasionally, they can use stories, because the students love them and it gives them a real experience of the language.
In terms of reading and writing, it is best if the students learn how to read and write in their own language before learning these skills in the foreign language. This minimizes the confusion of looking at the same letters and hearing different sounds. Yet, if the students are considered ready, some key points should be considered. First, the students need to be familiar with a wide range of vocabulary. Teachers should begin by reminding the students of the word, then show them the written word. Thus they learn to associate the shape of the word with the sound, rather than relying on the individual letter sounds to begin with. Once they have become familiar with a range of written words, they can be introduced to the sounds of certain letters, as they appear in the words they already know. Once they have learnt the sounds of certain letters and combinations of letters (th, ch, sh, etc), they can be introduced to more, and taught to work out how to read unfamiliar words, using the knowledge of how each letter or combination of letters sounds. Second, the fine motor skill of learning to write is best left to the first language. There is no point in teaching how to write each letter in two languages. Therefore, the students need to learn how to write in their own language before being asked to write in English.
Concluding Remarks
Seeing the fact that most teachers teaching EFL at primary schools do not qualify as English teachers, it is not surprising that the students’ proficiency in English is not satisfactory. Phenomenon like students entering universities, who have been studying English at least six years, are not able yet to speak English, shows that there is something wrong with the teaching of EFL in our country. Training primary school teachers to teach EFL is one way to eliminate such problems.
References
Cooper, Fiona L. (2007). Fun English for Kids. At http://www.scribd.com. Downloaded on May 2nd, 2008.
Flege, J.E. (1995). Second language speech learning : Theory, findings, and problems. In W. Strange (Ed). Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross- Language Research. York Press. Baltimore.
Krashen, S. & Terrell, T. (1983). The natural approach: Language acquisition in the classroom. Pergamon. Oxford.
Khul, P.K. & Iverson, P. (1995). Linguistic Experience and the "Perceptual Magnet Effect". In W. Strange (Ed). Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross- Language Research. York Press. Baltimore.
Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley, New York.
Musthafa, Bachrudin, M.A., Ph.D. 2003. EFL for Young Learners: Course Materials.Unpublished textbook. Bandung: Indonesia University of Education.
Reilly, V. and S. M. Ward (1997). Very Young Learners. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
