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possibilities to provide the enhanced assessment of learner s o as to improve student’s
skills. They mention that teachers must know the students’ current English level that
how many knowledge that they know by having conversation with students. Once the teachers know students’ level, they can provide the suitable assessment and it will
help improve students’ English level.
3. Teachers’ difficulties
When the teachers teach students in Indonesia, they face a lot of difficulties in the classroom. Based on my experience, teachers in Satya Wacana Christian Junior
High school need to handle some students who cannot write down the correct spelling of English vocabulary. For some students, it is not easy to get the correct spelling
since English is their foreign language. Johnston 1999, p. 64 indicates that “The
ability to hear, see, and use the rime as a reliable cue for reading new words and spelling words that sound alike, offers students a powerful insight into how English
spelling works”. It means that writing correct spelling is one of the most important learning parts for beginner learners so that they are able to speak, listen, read and
write. For supporting this statement, Lenski and Nierstheimer 2004 support that “When children are taught the spelling patterns of word families, they are empowered
to read and spell many more words” p. 186. Therefore, teachers need to teach the spelling to the students to improve their all English skills. However, even for the
student from English speaking country, teaching and learning spelling is not easy because students seem not recognize the words well especially in 1
st
and the 2
nd
year
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in junior high grade. Moreover, students might not know the correct pronunciation of some English words such as the word
‘weird’, ‘rhythm’, ‘occurred’, ‘pronunciation’ and many words. It happens because the spelling and pronunciation are not well-
matched in English since English has 26 letters and with those letters have 44 sounds. Motivating students can be challenging, in the stage of junior high school in
Indonesia because some students do not really want to study English. Lindsey’s
2006 finding indicated that “an academic process by which students are motivated to learn in ways that make a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how
they think, act, and feel.” It shows that teachers need to know how to handle student’s behavior, and the way they think. From my observation on Satya Wacana Christian
Junior High school, there are some reasons why they do not want to study. First, some students think that English is not important yet for their life since English is not
often used in daily life. They do not pay much attention to study English a lot. Second, some students think that studying English needs quite a lot of time to memorize
totally different meaning of the vocabulary and at the same time they need to understand difficult grammar items that much different comparing with their
language. Moreover, most of the students rarely speak English outside of school because it is not easy to find out the family use English in their home automatically.
Some s tudent’s desire of studying English is not high in Satya Wacana Junior High
school. However, English teachers still need to motivate junior high school students due to their duty of teaching English.
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Another teaching difficulty is student ’s different background knowledge due
to different types of elementary school they went to. According to Deputy Education and Culture Minister Musliar Kaslim, as stated in Jakarta Post 2012, English will no
longer be a subject in government elementary school. The current Indonesian curriculum has been changed by reducing the time for students to learn English and it
seems students lose the chance to learn English more. However, in non-government school such as international school or private school, English class is still one of the
required subjects. In international school, teachers and students use English in daily life and also English is used for teaching any kinds of subject in their school. In
general, students from international school already have quite high English knowledge since they often use it. The case for private school such as SD LAB,
students have 70 minutes bilingual class per week. It indicates that students have great experience to study English since 1
st
until 6
th
grade before entering the Junior high school. These statements make totally different
student’s English knowledge when they enter the junior high school. Students from government school will not be
able to understand well the English class in Junior high school because they did not have the English class in previous school. However, Students from non-government
school will understand the English class quite well because they had the English class in their elementary school. As the result, if these students are mixed into the one
classroom, teachers will have a lot of difficulties to teach the students with different English competences in one classroom because students have the totally different
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level of background knowledge of English, they must have different learning strategy to follow the class lesson and at the same time English teacher needs to care more
about lower level students in the classroom lesson. In addition, teachers must provide special strategies to care these different levels of students. For the lower students,
teachers must give more attention, and for the higher students, teachers must give extra assessment to improve their level. Moreover, Jones and Elizabeth 2009
support this statement that although schools are required to provide education to all children and public legislation urges us to leave no child behind; there are still a
number of students who end up being an afterthought in policy. It means that teachers take all students together to the higher level in spite of their different levels of
learning process. And it is very difficult for the current English teachers. Furthermore, controlling student’s behavior can be challenging. Since Satya
Wacana Christian Juinor High school has male and female students, sometimes they have some trouble with female and male students. And some students might have
behavioral disorder. Susan and Anderson 2012, p. 26 discover the characteristics of emotional and behavioral disorder that students might
act in the classroom “attitudes which demonstrate violent behaviors to others or retaliation in similar vein”,
“attitudes showing the tendency to want to lord it over others and make them fear you”, and “not caring about others or caring whether they suffer hurt”. Some students
are having that kinds of behavior disruption and it becomes one of the biggest
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teaching difficulties to handle these characteristics because teachers need to understand some characteristics of behavior disruption.
4. Requirement for the junior high school English teachers
