The Teaching and Learning Process

b. Setting up the Learning Experience

The learning experience is built by considering the different types of learning activities used by teachers. The learning activity is defined as the specification of what learners will actually do. Kyriacou 2009: 39 states that the basic task of effective teaching is to set up a learning experience in which pupils effectively engage in the mental activity that brings about those changes in the pupil’s cognitive structure that constitute the desired learning. On the same page, he adds that the pupil’s learning can be fostered in two main ways: 1 Teacher Exposition: listening to teacher exposition, which may include asking or being asked questions, watching a demonstration, and genuine teacher-pupil discussion. 2 Academic work: being instructed to undertake or engage in academic tasks activities, either on one’s own or together with other pupils. He 2009: 40 adds that teacher exposition tends to place emphasis on describing and explaining new information to pupils through direct teacher-pupil interaction, and is usually based on teaching the class as whole. Hence, the way pupils learn through teacher exposition is by listening, thinking and responding to what the teacher has to say. The main uses of teacher exposition are: 1 Making clear the structure and purpose of the learning experience 2 Informing, describing, and explaining 3 Using questions , dialogue and discussion to facilitate and explore pupil learning Moreover, the teacher has many roles in the teaching and learning process. Especially for the elementary school in Asia, the role of the teacher should be adapted with the changes of the society and the children needs. Paul 2003: 139 proposes that teachers should have roles: giving personal direction, providing help, giving extra help, asking and answering questions, and reducing dependency. The role of the teacher is as the facilitator and coach, not an authoritative director and arbiter. The teacher should be friendly and have close relationship with all students. The teacher supports the students to be independent in learning and improve their skill as their potency and effort. In addition, students are motivated to have interpersonal relationship with other students. The teacher can play the role as an interactive teacher through implementing various techniques. One of them is through fun learning which covers some learning activities to improve individual and social skills. The second way to foster the pupils’ learning is academic work. Kyricou 2009: 46 defines academic work as the academic tasks, activities, and experiences used by teachers, usually conjunction with teacher exposition. He 2009: 47 also proposes six main categories of academic work employed by teachers to complement teacher exposition: 1 Structured reading and writing tasks. 2 Investigational work. 3 Individualized programmes of work. 4 Small group work. 5 Experiental learning. 6 Using ICT. In the elementary school, the learning activities of English teaching and learning should take the children’s characteristic into account. Considering the children’s characteristic, instructional process is more proposed to make fun and comfortable condition which encourage students to use English naturally. The academic work and learning activities conducted should not only lead the English teaching as the tool in transferring knowledge but also in giving opportunity for the students to get learning experience so that they can pick up expressions as in the real communication. This explanation is based on some principles of teaching English effectively adapted from Depdiknas, 2008: 23 as follows: 1 Using method started with concrete things to abstract things, by using pictures, realia, or other things to help students understand the concept of language. 2 Considering of children characteristics, teachers use challenging games, stories, and songs to make the teaching process more interactive, interesting and meaningful. 3 Displaying students’ project can help them remember many vocabularies so they indirectly improve vocabularies so their confidences are developed instantly. 4 Repeating and developing the language by using some previous topic. 5 Choosing topics and activities relating to students’ daily life. 6 Giving challenging task appropriated with students’ ability. 7 Using common and simple language so they are more confidence. 8 Creating fun condition through fun games and activities or interesting media and change the activities each 10-15 minutes. 9 The teacher keeps a balance in conducting the cognitive and psychomotor activities. 10 Involving integrated skills so students have rich experience. 11 Ensuring students that English is easy to use in communication, including use the things in the environment to look deeper the relationship between language and environment. Besides the learning activities, appropriate materials should be taken into account. Depdiknas 2008: 18 have decided that the materials of English instructional must be relevant to students’ daily life. The students will easily develop the language when they know the relevancy of language input to the daily life. Besides, the materials should be based on students’ need and characteristics so the materials will be appropriate. It is proposed to limit the scope of material so students should not be burdened to learn a lot of declarative knowledge. Those are in line with Renold and Rixon in Tomlinson 2008:44 who state: In many English for Young Learners, material, however, language is actually presented in short chunks. It is rare to find a course in which children are helped to move from the understanding or production single chunks to the ability to produce substantial and coherent texts of their own, either in writing or in ‘long turns’ in speech. From the statements above, it can be concluded that the material of English teaching should be presented in the form of short chunks. It will help the students to move from their understanding about single chunk to ability to produce the substantial text in written or spoken forms. Furthermore, the materials should be interesting to the students. If the materials are not interesting, they will make the students feel bored in the classroom. Hutchinson and Waters 1987:10 state that the characteristic of good material is interesting texts. The second characteristic is the materials should