Culture which is Familiar to the Teacher

11 According to their AR journals, Lesson Plans and interviews, culture which is familiar to the teacher means that the teacher should know and understand well about the culture which is taught to the students. Rina in her third mini teaching explained about how to write descriptive texts with the correct generic structure and language features. Her class activity was a role play with Rina, the teacher, acted as foreign tourist and she wanted the students to act as local people who promoted the local places in Indonesia. To give the students the examples of places to be described, she used the pictures of some local places in Central Java such as Borobudur temple, Gedong Songo temple, Rawa Pening, and Ambarawa Train Museum. She chose local places in Central Java because: Here, I want to show the culture of Central Java only because I live in Java and I only knew about it. In this mini lesson, I hope that my students will be able to describe and promote some places in Central Java using English to the visitors especially to the foreigners and the students will use interesting words to describe that place in order to make people interested in visiting the places. Rina_ARJ 3, 7-12-2011 Rina used the places in Java because she is from Java, and she wanted the students to be able to understand and describe them. This idea is in line with Matsuda’s 2012 idea that the second source of culture the teacher can use in the EIL material is the culture of the interlocutor. This means that the students should be introduced with other cultures, in Matsuda’s case, the interlocutor’s culture. However, in this study, this idea is simplified into the classroom setting. Therefore, interlocutor can be referred to the teacher because teacher acts as the stud ents’ interlocutor in the classroom. Rina believed that by knowing other 12 cultures besides the students’ culture, it would help the students enrich their knowledge about the places in Java and later on they could explain it in the descriptive text. Almost similar to Rina, Novi, in her second mini teaching explained about traditional wedding ceremony in Indonesia. She used traditional wedding ceremonies because: The reason I choose this topic is to bring the EIL in my speaking class and I assume that my students are familiar with the wedding ceremony from their ethnicity. I think if the topic is familiar with the students. This topic relate to the EIL because students can share their costumes. Novi_ARJ 2, 13-11-2011 However, before she asked the students to share about their traditional wedding ceremony, she explained the ceremony from Sumba first. In her interview she said: I introduced my own culture first. Because I come from Sumba, I used my own culture to give example. While some of my students come from Java, so they explained Javanese culture. Later on in the interview she added: I used my own culture as the example because it is the only culture that I understand well. If I used other cultures that I do not know well, I was afraid that my explanation was wrong and that was not right. Novi_ Interview, 20-7-2012, my translation From Novi ’s ARJ and interview data above, it can be inferred that Novi used wedding ceremony because of three reasons. The first reason was because she believed that the wedding ceremony is the cultural product which the students can see in their neighborhood. In her activity, she wanted the students to share about their wedding ceremony. She believed 13 that by doing so, it could motivate and encourage the students to also share their own cultures. The second reason is from her interview data, Novi believed that using culture that the teacher was familiar with would help the teacher to avoid misdirecting the students. It means that she was afraid to tell something to the students wrongly because she didn’t understand the culture she was talking about. Besides of the reason above, Novi also had further purpose. This purpose was similar to Rina, which is to introduce culture and enrich the students’ knowledge about the culture. What Novi believed was also in line with Matsuda’s 2012 statement that second source of culture the teacher can use in the EIL material is the culture of the interlocutor. But, here Novi’s purpose is different from Rina. Another example of the use of culture which is familiar to the teacher found in this study was the material used by Aryani. In her third mini teaching, she used jamu as a cultural content because: In my third mini teaching, I only focused on one culture, Javanese, because almost all my students were Javanese, and I am a Javanese too. However, I thought that not all Javanese people understood about their own cultural product, therefore, I chose jamu as the topic in my mini teaching. In my opinion, if I used culture that I understood well, it could help me in developing the material. I hope, after joining my third mini teaching, my students, no matter from what ethnicity they came from, they would understand more about drinking jamu culture. Aryani_Interview, 25-7-2012 my translation From Aryani’s data above, it is clear that she only focused on Javanese culture that is familiar to her. Similar to Rina and Novi, she believed that by doing so, it would help her in explaining, developing, and teaching the material. In the class, Aryani brought the authentic 14 jamu so that the students could know about what jamu is, and they also could taste it. By using the authentic jamu as the real object, it could help her in describing the different taste of jamu because the students could drink it and later on they could differentiate about the taste of jamu which they had drunk. What Aryani believed is in line with McKay’s 2012 statement that EIL material should be relevant to the domains in which English is used in the particular learning context. The example that McKay 2012 states is the use of authentic material that is relevant to the place of teaching. In this case, Aryani used the authentic material which is jamu because she is a Javanese, and the place where she taught is in Java. Because jamu is a part of Javanese culture, therefore it is relevant with what being taught by Aryani. From the discussion above it is stated that there are two principles which are in line with the participants’ data. The first principle is from McKay’s 2012 statement which is EIL material should be relevant to the domains in which English is used in the particular learning context. This statement strengthens Aryani’s data that concerned on local beverage which is familiar to the teacher. Another principle is from Matsuda 2012 that EIL material could cover many cultures, one of them is interlocutors’ culture. This statement strengthens Novi and Rina’s data which concern on local ceremony and local places which are familiar to the teacher.

b. Culture which is familiar to the students

The second criteria guiding the participants’ material selection is using the culture which is familiar to the students. As Matsuda 2012 states the possible source of cultural content for EIL materials is the learners’ own culture. The data from the interview and action research journals shows that there are four participants who are Annita, Arimbi, Dhena, and Kania who considered using culture familiar to the students. 15 Annita in her third mini teaching focused on writing skills. She asked the students to mention the meaning of their names and the other students commented on the explanation.. The reason for such selection: I think this material would be very easy, because in the class the students not only come from Java, Sunda, and other places. So they use different accents. Therefore when they tried to give comment on their name, they also have different family names, So maybe other students would not know about that and they would be curious to listen to their friends’ explanation. Then from this activity, the students would understand the material that I give. Annita_Interview, 27-7-2012, my translation From the data above, Annita assumed that the students could share their culture with others because they learn the histories behind their names . The idea of using students’ culture is in line with Matsuda’s 2012 idea that the third source of culture the teacher can use in the EIL m aterial is the students’ culture. Moreover, Annita’s purpose of using culture which is familiar to the students is continuing Matsuda ’s 2012 idea that by reflecting on the things the students meet every day in their surrounding; it will help them involve in the classroom activity. Therefore Annita assumed that when the students can involve in the class activity, further they can be attracted to the material and they can share culture with others. The second example of the use of culture which is familiar to the students was found in Arimbi ’s material. In her second mini teaching, she exposed students to tourism places familiar to students because: So I wanted to teach English to the students by using material which was familiar to the students. In my mini teaching, I used some tourism places such as Sanur beach, Kuta beach, and Borobudur