The Effect of School Type on Academic Achievement:

3. Mode of traditional Islamic education seems to be universal. The pesantren education in Indonesia is equivalent of the mosque education in China. Open to all Muslim students, a mosque provides free accommodation and tuition for any student who comes to study. Then, in its development, commonly individual contributes money, or land for establishing mosque, pesantren, and Madrasah and the study was conducted at pesantren and Madrasah. Meanwhile the Chinese Indonesians contribute through the church. The church contribution is usually in the form of social services, such as policlinic, or hospital service rather than religious school. 4. For Muslim Indonesians the mastery of Arabic is important for learning Islamic knowledge. Therefore, the language had been and continue to be taught in formal schools. While for Chinese, Mandarin is not as important as Bahasa and English. The motivation for learning Mandarin is more instrumental and pragmatic, namely for business and communication purposes. 5. In general Muslim parent sent their children to Madrasah for either idealistic Madrasah teach Islamic values reason or practical Madrasah is cheaper than others reasons. In the contrary, Chinese Indonesia sent their children to Christian school for the quality of educational reasons than for religious or cultural reasons. 6. The major challenge for Madrasah is to improve human resources, school facilities, as well as school management. The challenging for Chinese school is to revive the foundation of Mandarin and its cultures, and to make their school more exclusive so it becomes the target of indigenous resentment. 84 84 A. Chaedar A lwasilah, “The Madrasah and the Chinese Education in Indonesia: A Comparative Study”, International Seminar on Islamic Culture and education in China Hongkong 28 April-2 Mei 2009.

E. Thingking Framework

Students’ achievement represents their learning process. On the process of learning, students’ have important role in determining their achievement. However, different student has different ability. Some students are better in learning than others. Some of them are progress to the materials, but some others are not or perhaps slow. This difference is affected by many factors, one of them is students’ background knowledge. Astudent who has much background knowledge about English must be easy to follow the lesson and ready to learn higher level. In other hand, a student who has lack of background knowledge about English must be got difficulties and it will be an obstracle to follow the higher level. The difference of background knowledge not only because of students ability itself, but also it influences by the external factors such as school where they had studied. For the students of English Education Department, they had studied English at the secondary schools. However, every school has different goal, and of course it determines learning process. Moreover, there are schools which characteristically difference. Thus, different school will graduate students with difference ability and language level, and the knowledge they got at schools will influence their learning process at university. A student who has background knowledge about the material he is going to learn, will easy to understand about the lesson and must be ready to learn further about the lesson. In other hand, a student who has lack background knowledge will find difficulties to understand, and they unready to learn higher level. Based on the explanation above, it can be inferred that students’ educational background is not less important in learning process and may influence students’ achievement in learning English.