Perspective
and characteristic. The objective of the character education is to develop learners so they can make decision in their life and preserve the good tradition. Then they can implement those
good values in their life as well as spread them to their surroundings. The theme of character education is to develop new generation who are honest, smart, tough and care.
Dr. Thomas Lickona defined that
“character education is the deliberate effort to help people understand, care about, and act upon core ethical values” Elkind Sweet: 2004.
They assert that when we think about the kind of character we want for our children, it’s clear
that we want them to be able to judge what is right, care deeply about what is right, and then do what they believe to be right
—even in the face of pressure from without and temptation from within.”
Developing character involves knowledge, feelings, and action. It is important to make students think critically about moral and ethical questions, inspire them to become committed
to moral and ethical actions, and give them opportunities to practice moral and ethical behavior. Character education is not only a theory. It involves practice, at least modeling in
the classroom. Character educator could be anyone. Whether he is a teacher, administrator, custodian, or
school bus driver. He is helping to shape the character of the kids who are in contact with. Character education can happen anyway and anywhere like the way he talks, the behaviors he
models, the conduct he tolerates, the deeds he encourage, the expectations he transmits. Yes, for better or for worse, all people already are doing character education. The people around
him will take him as a model for themselves. If the person is a teacher, it can be predicted how massive the influence he can make to his students. This is the reason to integrate
character education into formal language learning in the class.
2. Language Learning and Graphology
Language is a highly complicated activity, and when it is wholly learned. It involves both neural and muscular tissue, and it has psychological, interpersonal, and cultural aspects that
are indispensable to its acquisition and use. Brook in Titone and Danesi,1985: 37
Perspective
The quotation inspires me to explore character education. Because of the special characteristic of language learning which includes psychological, interpersonal and cultural
aspects all together, I try to integrate character education and language learning. Language is a mean of communication which is used by people to interact among them. Therefore, there is
a space to combine character education in language learning because both deal with psychology, interpersonal and cultural aspect.
To understand the characteristic of language, Weiten 1992:273-274 said that a language consists of symbols that convey meaning, plus rules for combining those symbols,
that can be used to generate an infinite variety. This definition includes four properties of language. First, language is symbolic; people use spoken sound and written words to
represent objects, actions, events, and idea. Second, language is semantic or meaningful. The symbols used in a language are arbitrary in that no built-in relationship exists between the
look or sound of words and the objects they stand for. Third, language is generative. A limited number of symbols can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to generate an
endless array of novel messages, sentences which have never spoken before. Fourth, language is structured. Although, it is possible to generate an infinite variety of sentences, but they
must be structured in a limited number of ways. Considering those properties of language, learning language, especially learning foreign
language i.e. learning English in Indonesia, may lead students to perform all kinds of learning based on psychological functions proposed by De Block in Winkel, 1991. They learn
dinamically, affectively, cognitively and senso-motorically. Dinamic learning is learning to develop desire proportionally. Affective learning is characterized by learning values of
objects through feeling and learning to express emotion normally. Cognitive learning involves mental process to represent objects through ideas and opinions with words to be
understood. Senso-motoric learning covers physical operation. Character education can be integrated with English learning by careful design of material and methode of teaching and
learning to apply. Furthermore, language learning can be integrated with character education in an
integrated skill instruction. To understand integrated-skill instruction, Oxford 2001
