Tahun 2005, the responsibilities of civil servant teachers consist of main and additional duties. The main duties cover planning, executing and evaluating
processes, giving academic consultancy and training. Meanwhile, the additional duties commonly deal with administrative works.
Further, Law No. 14 Tahun 2005 also mentions that being separated from the administrative works, senior high school teachers have to teach 24 hours
teaching sessions for the minimum and 40 hours teaching sessions for the maximum in a week. In the relation to teaching English, senior high school
teachers have two hours in a week for the compulsory English and three hours in a week for the elective English.
3. Teacher Cognition
It has to be realized that each teacher has their own individual ideas, ways of doing things, and preferences, which makes it obvious that if in this study the
researcher wants to understand completely what the teachers do, the researcher then needs to understand what they know and believe.
Teacher cognition is defined as what language teachers think, know, and believe, which is then reflected through their teaching practice Borg, 2003.
Teacher cognition is considered important to discuss in this study. Knowledge of language has significant influence
toward the effectiveness of the teachers‟ teaching performance. The accumulation of understanding owned by the teachers,
added by their prior language learning and teaching experience, changes their views into beliefs about language teaching. The beliefs are reflected through their
every detail classroom teaching practice.
4. Four Strands
Dealing with the language skills, teachers need to be aware that each of the language skills, listening, speaking, reading, writing, are different from the others.
Due to that, it is needed to break down each skill and give attention to each of them. Learning language opportunities can be separated into four strands:
meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development Nation, 2007. These strands should become a
consideration of teachers in providing learning materials and activities.
a. Meaning-focused Input
Meaning-focused input deals with receptive learning which involves finding a meaning for word form. It covers learning trough listening and reading.
It is called meaning-focused as in all the works accomplished in this strand, the main focus of the students should be on understanding and gaining knowledge or
enjoyment from what they listen to and read. The activities covered in this strand are reading novels, listening to songs, watching films, and so on.
This strand will be achieved if most of what the students are listening to or reading is already familiar to them. Besides, it is also needed that the students are
interested in the input and want to understand it. Further, only a small proportion of the language features are unknown to the students. The students are also
expected to gain some knowledge of the unknown language items through context clues and background knowledge. The last, there are large quantities of input
exposed to the students.
b. Meaning-focused Output
Meaning-focused output strand deals with productive learning which involves searching for and producing a word. It covers learning through speaking
and writing. The activities involved in this strand are being involved in conversations, telling stories, writing letters, and so on. This strand demands
certain conditions as focused-meaning input does. First, the students are required to write and talk about things that are largely familiar to them. Next, the students‟
main goal should be to convey their message to someone else. Besides, the proportion of the unfamiliar language the students need to use is small. The
students can also apply communication strategies, dictionaries or previous input to make up for gaps in their productive knowledge. Lastly, opportunities to speak
and write are large.
c. Language-focused Learning
It involves the intentional learning of language features such as pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and discourse. The aim of this
strand is to learn language items. Typical activities in this strand involve pronunciation practice, learning vocabulary from word cards, translation,
memorizing dialogues, guessing from context, using dictionary, and getting feedback about writing. Language-focused learning activities mostly can have a
positive effect on learning and language use, but it is suggested to be applied in a small portion of the course and do not become the entire course. The language-
focused learning strand should not be held more than one-quarter of the time spent on the entire course.
