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Vocational Schools, English is a required major, but teaching English has its own problems. Those problems are the lacks of learners’ motivation, lacks of allocated
time, lacks of resources and materials, and the number of students. Added to those problems, English in Curriculum 2013 expects learners to learn English as same
as students of Senior High Schools. The learning materials are published by the Indonesian government. Teaching English in vocational school is quite
challenging if ther teachers are expected to teach many technical terms in each major in vocational schools.
3. Curriculum a. Definition
Some experts have their own definition on what is meant by a curriculum. According to Nation Macalister 2010: 1, a curriculum is a guidance in
designing courses that consists of outer cycle; namely principles, environment, and needs that involve practical and theoretical considerations that will have a
major effect in guiding the actual process of course production, and inner cycle that consists of goals, as its centre, contents, and sequences, format and
presentation, and monitoring and assessment. Richards and Schmidt 2002: 139 define a curriculum as a set of plan to
guide a program. The program usually has several components: a the aims or goals of the program; b syllabus; c methodology; d assessment and testing;
and e evaluation.
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The Laws of Education System number 20 year 2003 defines a curriculum as a set of plan which contains goals, contents, materials, and method used as a
guide in teaching learning process. From theories above, It can be concluded that a curriculum is the
framework that underlies before a program. It covers aims, contents, sequences how the contents are going to be taught, teaching principles, assessment, and
how a program are evaluated whether it reachs the goals or not in eduacational settings.
b. Curriculum 2013
Curriculum 2013 is the latest national curriculum in Indonesia. The curriculum is intended to succeed the school-based curriculum, the national
curriculum dated in 2006. According to Curriculum 2013, English is a required major in vocational schools. However, the allocated time for teaching English is
only once a week. Inside Curriculum 2013, there are two important things that need to be considered in teaching subject matter. They are Core Competence and
Basic Competence. Core Competence include four basic competences that should be attained by students in every educational level: spiritual, social attitude,
knowledge, and skills. The Basic Competence is the further explanation of the core competence. The following table is the core competence and basic
competence of English taught in vocational schools for grade XI. By implementing Curriculum 2013, the government forces both students
and teachers to use Scientific Approach in teaching learning process. The following figure is the explanation of the Scientific Approach.
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Figure 1. Schema of Scientific Approach
Based on the figure above, Curriculum 2013 which emphasizes on Scientific Approach can be implemented in all field studies.
The impact of Curriculum 2013 is that the teachers are required to teach based on the Scientific Approach SA. The steps of implementing SA in teaching
learning process are: observing texts, questioning asking questions, experimenting collecting data, associating analyzing data and drawing
conclusions, communicating and finding knowledge, and creating texts. 1 Observing text
In the first step, students are required to receive or get exposed to English language input. This need to be done so that students have some perceptions in
their mind what kind of text that they are going to learn. In this stage, students are
