Story telling Mime The Overview of Drama Performance Based-Activities

20 It is equally important to be familiar with the school condition in Papua. Munro 2013 describes the school condition in Jayawijaya and highlands in Papua as followed: A recent World Bank study found that in Jayawijaya there are just four primary schools per one thousand schoolage children, which is roughly half the national average. Around 60 percent of all villages in Jayawijaya do not have a primary school, and the average distance from these villages to the nearest school is seven kilometers. The average distance from these villages to a secondary school ranged from twenty-three to thirty-two kilometers. Local terrain is hilly or mountainous, criss-crossed by rivers and a patchwork of marshes, swamps, and gardens. Transportation is limited and expensive p.36. These backgrounds support the idea that Papuan seminarians have high naturalist intelligence. Due to their nature Papuan seminarians were accustomed to speaking out loud and moving quickly. Thus, their physical and visual abilities were much better than any other students in other places in Indonesia. This kind of intelligence is closely related to bodily-kinesthetic intelligence which facilitates students to control bodily movement and to handle object skillfully Gardner, 1996 in Huffman Vernoy 2010. Hence, this background enables drama performance-based activities to be used as the instructional technique to cultivate the Papuan seminarians’ fluency in English since drama requires physical response as its main principle.

b. The Overview of the Oral Tradition of Papuans

Language is the ability to understand and use a structured system of communication Evans Thompson, 2013, p.1. Language is divided into two, written and oral. People who have had writing system or alphabet are known as people with written tradition. People with written tradition record their history and 21 literature in the form of written documents such as letters, books, scripts, and others. People who do not have alphabet in their language are known as people with oral tradition. People with oral tradition will transmit the cultural material orally from one generation to another. Most of Papuan tribes did not have their own alphabets. They were accustomed to use the oral tradition. Slamet 1964 points out that Papuans, Flores and Kei are people with oral tradition. They do not have any alphabets or written record on their history and traditions. Instead, they tell their values and traditions orally from generation to generations through symbols, ceremonies, songs, myths, and stories p.25. This background rendered to the missing of normal process of abstraction, where language was its main agent. Most of the Papuan seminarians were unable to represent language in writing form, and vice versa namely coding and decoding. As the consequences of the oral tradition, most of Papuan seminarians were not able to compose sentences incorrectly both in Indonesian and English. Concerning the used for teaching and learning process in Papua, Surya 2013 claims that the main problem of education in Indonesian is the lack of good teachers and appropriate methods. Nowadays, the technique used in Papua such as rewriting the materials from the blackboards without emerging comprehension of the students is useless p.126. His statements indicate that in teaching Papuan seminarians, the technique which focuses on writing activities must be avoided since it does not strongly cultivate students’ understanding in learning.