Overview Teaching profession and the teaching of English in Indonesia

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Chapter 6 Discussion and Interpretation

6.1 Overview

This chapter presents the discussion and interpretation of the findings from the present study. It is presented in a framework that serves to provide answers for the key questions that have driven this study. As a back drop to the discussion I briefly describe the status of the teaching profession from the Indonesian perspective. This description will frame the discussion and interpretation of the findings. In addition, in an effort to provide a comprehensive contextual basis for understanding my interpretation of the findings, I also considered it necessary to present a description of the trends in teaching English in the region at the time the data were collected.

6.2 Teaching profession and the teaching of English in Indonesia

As discussed in the background chapter, being a member of the teaching profession in Indonesia offers teachers high social status. However, this high social status does not provide teachers with high levels of privilege, academic recognition, and good financial returns. Teachers are stereotyped as being those who live modest and simple lives. In addition, the poor salary of teachers very often requires them to take on other jobs to support themselves and their families. 190 The teaching profession does not provide teachers with high academic recognition and they are often critiqued and blamed for the low achievement of the students in the national examinations and in particular, for the low quality of the country‘s educational outcomes. In addition to living modest and simple lives, teachers are also stereotyped as being not very smart and to be poorly qualified. The only attraction of the profession is probably related to the fact that in most cases it is a life-long profession which provides for a life-long pension. Once a teacher manages to pass the government teacher recruitment test and becomes a civil servant teacher, there is little chance of losing that position. This is perhaps why although teachers do not get a high salary and are not academically recognized, there are many who want to enter the profession. In addition, teacher retention is not an issue for teacher recruitment authorities and employers in Indonesia. There are few cases of teachers quitting the profession, except on death or retirement. Once recruitment is made, cases of quitting teaching due to bad evaluation results are rare. Although the teaching profession might be as stressful in Indonesia as it is in other countries, it seems that not many people talk about teacher stress and the flow-on effects of the stress among teachers in Indonesia. In most cases, teachers will remain in teaching until retirement day, no matter how stressful their work becomes. 191 The teaching of English in Indonesia, in particular, has changed over the last three decades. English has been taught using different approaches such as the audiolingual, grammar translation methods, and the communicative approach. At the time the data were collected, it was at the beginning of the period when competency-based English teaching was being implemented. This new form of English teaching was first introduced in 2003 together with the introduction of the draft of the new curriculum, the Competency-based Curriculum CBC, which later became known as the Curriculum 2004, followed by further revisions in the form of Curriculum 2006. After the initial drafting by the government, in this case the Ministry of National Education MoNE, the draft of the new curriculum was introduced and distributed to teachers through workshop and training programs, one of which was the Competency-based integrated training CBIT program. This nationally conducted training program covered materials ranging from language skills to practical implementation of the curriculum. It also covered the philosophical bases of the curriculum, as well as the syllabus design, material development and assessment of student achievement. The training even recommended teaching materials and approaches to support the implementation of the curriculum in the classroom. From the perspective of CBC, English teaching objectives were formulated in the form of competences. The competency-based curriculum divided the learning objectives into competence standards, which were then broken down 192 into basic competences. Each competence standard was composed of five basic competencies: a discourse competence, b actional competence, c linguistic competence, d socio-cultural competence, and e strategic competence. In practice, the curriculum considered discourse competence the main communicative competence learners should demonstrate Depdiknas: 2003, 6. However, CBC also stated that discourse competence could only be achieved if learners acquired the other four supporting competencies Depdiknas: 2004, pp. 6-7. This requirement of achieving discourse competence seemed to be closely related to the notion of communicative competence proposed by Canale and Swain 1980, Swain 1983 and Celce-Murcia Olshtain 2000. In terms of the classroom implementation, although there were shared beliefs among teachers there was no single most effective approach in the teaching of English. There was also a strong indication during the training that the government recommended one approach to English teaching, namely the genre- based approach. Although this approach was originally associated with teaching reading and writing, in the Indonesian context it was adapted to teaching English as a foreign language EFL. Based on this approach, teaching English emphasized the ability of the students to produce texts in both spoken and written English and organized teaching into two cycles with four steps in each cycle: building of the field BKOF, modelling of text MOT, joint construction of text JCOT and independent construction of text ICOT. The impact of training in the genre approach was so significant that the approach 193 was considered the most appropriate when teaching English, and was implemented on most occasions by most English teachers. In addition, the teaching of English in Indonesia was influenced by the contextual teaching and learning CTL approach introduced shortly before the CBC. While the genre-based approach provided the procedural steps in EFL teaching, CTL provided more conceptual aspects of teaching. EFL teachers in Indonesia were quite familiar with the CTL, particularly with its seven principles that were considered essential in the instruction: constructivism, contextual learning, inquiry, modeling, learning community, promoting interaction among learners, and authentic assessment. Based on the CTL, the conduct of English teaching would involve as many of its principles as possible. Therefore, the teaching of English in Indonesia was designed based on the genre-based approach and was nuanced with the principles of contextual teaching and learning. Another important practice in the English teaching in Indonesia concerned the assessment of the students‘ achievement. Assessment was carried out on the basis of a block system and was usually done at the end of each unit of teaching materials. However, there was an indication that the most important assessment of the students‘ achievement was the national examination conducted at the end of the schooling period. For the junior secondary school it was done at the end of the third year Year 9. This was considered to be most important because the results were powerful determinants concerning which senior high school 194 students could attend after graduation from the junior high and for their future after completing school. Unfortunately, this result was also considered by parents and society more generally, as the most important measure of the successful teaching. Due to the importance of the role of the national examination, teachers were often forced to focus on students achieving high scores in the exam, and neglected other objectives of learning a school subject, for example establishing the communicative skills of the students. In an effort to meet the demands of parents, schools have often required teachers to prepare the students for the examinations by providing them with drilled practice exercises. This has been a continuing concern for teachers and has been hotly debated among English teachers in Indonesia. Since the national exam focuses mostly on the reading and grammatical skills, the teachers have often neglected the student communicative skills. This has resulted in an impression that teachers failed to help students speak English for communication.

6.3 English Teachers’ self-efficacy: Overall Findings