T1 112012132 Full text

RAISING STUDENTS‟ INTERCULTURAL AWARENESS IN ELT
CLASSROOM OF 2013 CURRICULUM: TEACHERS‟
PERSPECTIVES

THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan

FRENKY BATUNAN
112012132

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION PROGRAM
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS
UNIVERSITAS KRISTEN SATYA WACANA
SALATIGA
2016

RAISING STUDENTS‟ INTERCULTURAL AWARENESS IN ELT
CLASSROOM OF 2013 CURRICULUM: TEACHERS‟
PERSPECTIVES

THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan

FRENKY BATUNAN
112012132

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION PROGRAM
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS
UNIVERSITAS KRISTEN SATYA WACANA
SALATIGA
2016
i

“RAISING STUDENTS‟ INTERCULTURAL AWARENESS IN ELT
CLASSROOM OF 2013 CURRICULUM: TEACHERS‟
PESRPECTIVES”
THESIS

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan

Frenky Batunan
112012065

Approved by:

Supervisor

Examiner

Gita Hastuti, M.A.

Athriyana Pattiwael, M.Hum.

i

PUBLICATION AGREEMENT DECLARATION

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: Frenky Batunan
_______________ _
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: Faculty of Language and Arts
: Undergraduate Thesis

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“Raising Students‟ Intercultural Awareness in ELT Classroom of 2013 Curriculum:
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Frenky Batunan
Approved by
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Thesis Examiner

Gita Hastuti, M.A.

Athriyana Pattiwael, M.Hum.
ii

COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

This thesis contains no such material as has been submitted for examination in any course
or accepted for the fulfillment of any degree or diploma in any university. To the best of
my knowledge and my belief, this contains no material previously published or written by
any other person except where due reference is made in the text.

Copyright@ 2016. Frenky Batunan and Gita Hastuti, M.A.
All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced by any means without the
permission of at least one of the copyright owners or the English Language Education
Program, Faculty of Language and Arts, Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Salatiga.

Frenky Batunan:

iii

Table of Contents

INSIDE COVER ................................................................................................................i
APPROVAL FORM .........................................................................................................ii
PUBLICATION AGREEMENT DECLARATION .....................................................iii
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT ......................................................................................... iii
Table of Contents.................................................................................................................v
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... 1
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 2
LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................ 4
Construction of Culture: Culture with 'Big C' and 'small c.......'.............................5
Addressing Culture-Bound Topics and Culture-Bound language items.................6
The Previous studies................................................................................................7
Addressing Intercultural Awareness in ELT Context..............................................7
The Nature of 2013 Curriculum in Indonesia..........................................................8
THE STUDY.................................................................................................................... 10
Research Methods..........................................................................................................10
Context of the Study...................................................................................................... 10
Participants .................................................................................................................... 11
Data Collection Instrument ........................................................................................... 11
Data Collection Procedure ............................................................................................ 13

Data Analysis Procedure ............................................................................................... 14
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .................................................................................... 14
Basic Concept of Culture.......................................................................................14
Construction of Cultural Content...........................................................................19
Addressing Intercultural Awareness......................................................................25
Challenges and Benefits from Addressing Intercultural Awareness.....................27
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 30
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................................. 32
iv

REFERENCES.................................................................................................................33
APPENDICES..................................................................................................................36
Appendix A............................................................................................................36
Appendix B............................................................................................................37
Appendix C............................................................................................................38
Appendix D............................................................................................................39
Appendix E............................................................................................................40
Appendix F............................................................................................................41
Appendix G............................................................................................................42
Appendix H............................................................................................................43

Appendix I............................................................................................................44
Appendix J............................................................................................................46
Appendix K...........................................................................................................47

v

Raising Students‟ Intercultural Awareness in ELT Classroom of 2013 Curriculum:
Teachers‟ Perspectives

Frenky Batunan

Abstract
The relation between culture and language has always been the concern of all the
stakeholders in ELT. Brown (2001) proposed that culture and language are intertwined
and cannot be separated without losing its significance. This means that learning the
knowledge of English means embracing the variety of new culture that comes with it.
Zhu (2010) defines that culture can be divided into two major aspects, such as culturebound topics and culture-bound language items. These two aspects are very important to
be addressed in ELT classroom. In our current curriculum of Kurikulum 2013, there is
urgency for the academic practitioners to address the intercultural awareness through
culture-bound topics and culture-bound language items. Working with classroom

observation and semi-structured interview, this study aims at revealing what teachers do
to address intercultural awareness in ELT classroom of Kurikulum 2013. The study was
conducted with four junior high school teachers who used the Kurikulum of 2013 in their
classrooms as the subjects of the research. As the result of this study, the researcher
found that the teachers are aware of the concept of culture and its variety and able to
address various culture-bound topics with the emphasis on culture with „small c‟. On the
other hand, the culture-bound language items are not well-addressed as culture-bound
topics in the learning process.
Key words: intercultural awareness, kurikulum 2013, culture-bound topics, culturebound language items

1

Introduction
Many academic practitioners in ELT believe that there is a strong connection
between language and culture. Learning a target language is not simply about having the
knowledge about the form and meaning of the language, but it also has the cultural
content associated with it. Brown (2001) proposed that language and culture are
intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate them without losing the significance of
either language or culture. As the output of culture, the learner needs to acquire some
familiarity and understanding with the culture associated with the target language that

he/she wishes to acquire. Acquiring a new language means to experience the products,
practices and perspectives that are different from the learner‟s cultural background. In
other words, this is more than just a process of transferring the knowledge of syntax and
lexicon, but also a dialectic connection between language and culture.
Moreover, Zhu (2010) argued that ELT teachers need to be bicultural or have the
sufficient knowledge regarding culture of the target language with adequate
competencies development that is related to intercultural communication skills. This is
important because teachers are the important stakeholders that the students look forward
to as one of their primary sources of knowledge. Thus, it is impossible for an English
teacher to teach language without presenting its culture. Byram and Risager (1999)
claimed that the language teacher has the role as a “professional mediator between
foreign languages and culture” (p. 58). ELT teachers need to be able to expose their
students with the culture of the target language in order to fulfill their responsibility as a
medium of intercultural understanding.
2

However, in the status quo, the academic practitioners often failed in dealing with
the complexity aspects of a target culture. As noted by Önalan in 2005, he found that in
reality, teachers more likely teach students about the English culture in terms of
food/fashion although they say they will look at it on deeper sociological levels. Food

and fashion are only the surface of a culture‟s identity. There are invisible aspects that
lay behind a culture, such as perspectives and values that can only be understood with
good pedagogical rationales.
As we know, teaching materials and teachers are two stakeholders that play an
important role in determining the quality of our ELT classroom. Moreover, as stated by
Byrnes (2008) many EFL teachers have had no formal training in incorporating culture
elements, and there is no universally accepted set of criteria that instructors can use as a
guide. Having lack of awareness, teachers often use the textbooks without even
observing and evaluating the material in the first place. The reasons of this phenomenon
may be varied from lack of time to prepare the materials, unclear policy or even the lack
of knowledge from the teacher himself. Thus, the only tool that they can rely is the
textbooks that they use as the guide. However, Widdowson (2005) criticized that typical
EFL text has failed to provide the realistic cultural content that engage the students.
Thus, the teachers must be aware of their teaching materials and provide cultural content
that suits students‟ cultural background.
Being aware of the importance of intercultural competence in learning process,
the Indonesian government tried to incorporate the cultural knowledge into its education
system by developing 2013 curriculum that promotes the adequate amount of cultural
3

content from various cultural elements in a product of textbook entitled “When English
Rings Bell”. Thus, new approaches and methods need to be developed in order to adjust

this new wave of changes. This phenomenon of adapting the new and former approaches
needs to be addressed in order to understand what the teachers do to raise their students‟
intercultural awareness. This paper aims at researching the process on how the teachers
adjust their instructional rationales with cultural content in the textbook. The significance
of this research is to promote some pedagogical rationales in developing the methods to
deal with cultural content in ELT class. At the end, the researcher expects that that this
paper will promote the awareness of the cultural content in language learning process.
Literature Review
Construction Of Culture: Culture With „Big C‟ And „small c‟
There were many definitions of culture from different experts. One of them was
introduced by Goode et al in 2000. He defined culture as “integrated pattern of human
behaviour that includes thoughts, communications, languages, practices, beliefs, values,
customs, courtesies, rituals, manners of interacting and roles, relationships and expected
behaviors of a racial, ethnic, religious or social group; and the ability to transmit the
above to succeeding generations.” (p.2). Simply, it means that culture can be seen as
something that is related with human behaviour as the representation of a certain
community and it has been passed through generations.
Further, Cortazzi and Jin (1999) proposed three patterns of cultural content as the
guide for us to frame this issue. They divided culture into three contents, such as source
4

culture, target culture and international culture. In general, source culture materials are
the learners‟ own cultural content, the target culture materials are the cultural content of
the target language that the learners wish to acquire, and the international culture
materials are the cultural content when English takes place as the use of communication
in the international context. Each pattern has its own nature and needs to be addressed as
clearly as possible by the teacher through the learning materials. In order to have the
intercultural awareness in dealing with these three elements, one must have the ability to
see the link between various cultures and interpret the products and perspectives of
culture with critical thinking.
Moreover, Adaskou et al. (1990) proposed two senses of understanding a culture,
which are the aesthetic sense as a culture with „Big c‟ and sociological sense as a culture
with „small c‟. The aesthetic sense with a „Big c‟ covers literature, media, music, the
cinema, and so on as products and practices. On the other hand, the sociological sense
with „small c‟ includes customs, interpersonal relations, leisure, nature of family or home
life, and institutions as the perspectives.

Addressing Culture-Bound Topics And Culture-Bound Language Items
Zhu (2010) proposed two major approaches that can be used to identify and
address the cultural content in ELT classrooms. He divided the construction of a culture
into culture–bound topics and culture-bound language items. These two approaches are
different in terms of their characteristics and forms. Culture-bound topics are related to
5

the cultural issue, topic or information from a culture, while culture-bound language
items are the speaking, reading, listening and writing styles of a culture.
Moreover, According to The Standards for Foreign Language Learning/ NSFLEP
(1999), on each pattern (source, target, and international culture materials), there are
three layers that can be seen as the output of a culture. These layers are perspectives
(norms and values), practices (habits), and products (songs, foods, clothes, etc). These
patterns are integrated and can be observed as the distinguished characteristics of a
community.
Based on the explanation above, there are four literature works that become the
main focus of this study. They are patterns of cultural content by Cortazi and Jin (1999);
two senses of understanding culture by Adaskou et all (1990); two major approaches by
Zhu (2010); and output layers of a culture by The Standars for Foreign Language
Learning/ NSFLEP (1999). These four concepts are related and need to be adressed in
order to understand how the teachers raise the intercultural awareness in their English
language teaching. In the cultural patterns proposed by Cortazi and Jin (1999) exist the
senses of small c culture and capital c culture that have been introduced by Adaskou et
all (1990). The small c culture represents the perspectives and the capital c culture
represents the practices and products. Perspectives, practices and products are the output
layers of a culture constructed by The Standards for Foreign Language Learning/
NSFLEP. And the culture-bound topics and culture-bound language items proposed by
Zhu in 2010 can be used to observe the existence of perspectives, practices and products
of a culture.
6

The previous studies
Fenner (2001) conducted a study about literary text in the lower secondary. The
project is known as „Dialogic interaction with literary texts in the lower secondary
classroom‟. The setting of this project was teaching English as a foreign language in
Norwegia for 14-year-old learners. The result showed that cultural artifacts in foreign
language learning interaction, both in the reading process and in the writing classroom
discourse, enhanced the learners‟ awareness of their own culture which they had brought
to the text, as well as of the foreign cultures as represented in the texts. The literary text
from the foreign culture forces the readers to reflect on their own culture and identity and
gives the learners a chance to see themselves from the outsider‟s point of view.This
example is the burden proof on how the awareness of other cultures would likely advance
the students‟ development in understanding not only their own culture but also others‟.

Addressing Intercultural Awareness in EFL context
McKay (2003) urged us to be aware that culture has an important role in learning
a language. She claimed that culture has a significant relation with two important aspects
of a language. First, culture is related with the language structure of the target language
that later will also contribute to the learners‟ understanding of the levels of semantics,
pragmatics and discourse. Second, culture needs to be addressed by pedagogical
reasoning in choosing the suitable cultural content materials of the target language that is
appropriate with the learners. This leads her to the conclusion that there are two
7

important points in language teaching. First, it is the fact that learners need to arrive at
the point of awareness with the cultural aspects of a language consciously. Second, it is a
teacher‟s responsibility to help the learners to manipulate their consciousness when they
encounter the cultural aspects of a language. These two points support the argument to
promote intercultural awareness in English language teaching.
In line with that, Byram (2000) described that in order to fully understand a
language one must have what he called as „intercultural awareness‟. The intercultural
awareness refers to the state of being able to see the differences between cultures.

The Nature of 2013 Curriculum in Indonesia
In recent years, there have been some changes in the educational curriculum in
Indonesia. In our recent curriculum of 2013, there is an urgency to promote the cultural
awareness in the teaching learning process. As stated in the Letter of decree by Ministry
of Education and Culture of Indonesia No. 70 (2013), or „Peraturan Menteri Pendidikan
dan Kebudayaan Republik Indonesia, Nomor 70 tahun 2013 tentang Kerangka Dasar
dan Struktur Kurikulum Sekolah Menengah Kejuruan/Madrasah Aliyah Kejuruan ‟, there

are some points that condition the academic practitioners in Indonesia to address the
cultural content and intercultural awareness in the learning process. First, in its
philosophical foundation section, point „a‟ stated:
“Pendidikan berakar pada budaya bangsa untuk membangun kehidupan
bangsa masa kini dan masa mendatang. Pandangan ini menjadikan
Kurikulum 2013 dikembangkan berdasarkan budaya bangsa Indonesia yang
8

beragam, diarahkan untuk membangun kehidupan masa kini, dan untuk

membangun dasar bagi kehidupan bangsa yang lebih baik di masadepan.”
(p.7)
Simply, it can be translated that the education in Indonesia is rooted from its own
culture in order to develop the nation at present and in the future. This foundation shows
that in order to develop the community, specifically in Indonesia, it is our responsibility
as academic practitioners to facilitate the students‟ awareness of the various cultures in
Indonesia.
Second, in 2013 curriculum, there are four competencies that the students
need to acquire. In the second competency, which is related to the social
competency it states;
Menghayati dan Mengamalkan perilaku jujur, disiplin, tanggung-jawab, peduli
(gotongroyong, kerjasama, toleran, damai), santun, responsive dan pro-aktif
dan

menunjukkan

sikap

sebagai

bagian

dari

solusi

atau

berbagai

permasalahan dalam berinteraksi secara efektif dengan lingkungan sosial dan
alam, serta dalam menempatkan diri sebagai cerminan bangsa dalam
pergaulan dunia. (p. 11)

The key point of this competency lies in the part that “dalam menempatkan diri
sebagai cerminan bangsa dalam pergaulan dunia ”, which means „to be able to adjust

themselves (students) as the reflection of the nation in the world association‟. This
suggests that teachers need to expose the students to varied cultural contents in order to
prepare them to represent Indonesia in the intercultural communication.

9

The Study
Research Methods
In order to address the issue of intercultural awareness in the classroom of 2013
curriculum, a research that focuses on the teachers‟ approaches in dealing with cultural
content in ELT needs to be proposed. Working with qualitative nature of case study, the
researcher expects to reveal the teachers‟ methods of promoting intercultural awareness.
This method allows the researcher to investigate the similarities and specified
characteristics to provide the researcher a chance to generalize the relationship between
variables in the study. Thus, the research question is: What do the teachers do to raise
intercultural awareness in the learning process of 2013 curriculum? By raising this
research question, the researcher expects to answer the phenomenon on how the teachers
raise the awareness of cultural differences and promote the intercultural awareness in the
learning process.

Context of the Study
The research took place in a public junior high school in Salatiga, Indonesia,
which employed the 2013 curriculum. When the study was conducted, the school used
the government-recommended product of the 2013 curriculum, i.e a book entitled “When
English Rings a Bell”. The reason behind the selection of the school was because the

school got the award of “School with nation‟s culture” from the Ministry of Education in
2013. The award was given for achieving a good review in the context of cultural respect
in cultural diversity in the school context. Thus, regarding the scope of this research, the
10

researcher believes that the feasibility to observe the school in the time constrains, the
existence of 2013 curriculum, and the potential intercultural topics occurred during the
learning process, will justify the selection of this context of this study.

Participants
The participants of this study are four junior high school teachers, two male and
two female. These teachers were teaching grade 7-9 at a public school in Salatiga.
However, the study focused the investigation on the classroom practices in Grade 7 and 8
only. The participants were selected with the expectation that the teachers were aware of
cultural differences and could bring up the issue of intercultural awareness in their
classrooms. Considering the school‟s good name as “School with nation‟s culture” and
for the sake of anonymity the participants‟ names were each changed to a code; PH, AR,
NI and NP.

Data Collection Instruments
In attempt to find what the teachers do to raise intercultural awareness in ELT
classroom of the 2013 curriculum, the data were collected through classroom
observations and personal interviews. The main instrument in this study is the personal
interviews and classroom observations function as the complementary of the data.
1) Classroom observations

Classroom observations were employed to observe how the participants deal with
the cultural content in the classroom. A classroom observation protocol was used to

11

record the observation, which covers the culture-bound topics, culture-bound language
items, and cultural content (source/target/international cultures).
Before the classroom observation protocol was used, the researcher piloted it
twice in the target classes. Due to efficiency in writing the notes, a table for each point
was developed to help the researcher analyze the data.
2) Interview

Interview with the participants were conducted to dig more detailed information
about teachers‟ perspective and methodology. The questions were developed regarding
the criteria of „intercultural awareness‟ proposed by Byram (1997), the concept of
cultural content by Cortazzi and Jin (1999), and also culture-bound language items and
culture-bound topics developed by Zhu (2010). Each interview contained ten questions
with different aims or goals.
The questions that were aksed are:
1. What is culture to you?
2. What is the importance of culture to you?
3. Which part of culture that you perceived important for your students‟
learning?
4. Is there any topic that you have presented in the classroom that is related to
the culture/cultural contents?
5. Which one should be presented first? Source, target, or international culture
materials?
6. How to address cultural content in the classroom?

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7. Is there any challenge that you have faced when adressing cultural content?
8. What are the benefits of addressing intercultural awareness for the students
and teacher?
Question 1, 2 and 3 focuses on the basic concept of culture, Question 4 and 5 is
about the construction of cultural contents. Question 6 focuses on teachers‟ instrcutional
to introduce cultural content. The last but not the least, Question 7 and 8 focuses on the
challenges and benefits from addressing intercultural awareness for the students and
teachers. The interviews were conducted mostly using Indonesian with a small amount of
English. It is expected that the personal interview could encourage the participants to
share their opinions, concerns, and personal experiences related to the topic of
intercultural awareness.

Data Collection Procedures
The researcher observed the class where the teachers used the book “When
English Rings a Bell” and other materials that were related to the cultural content. Each

teacher was observed twice by the researcher during their regular daily teaching. During
each observation the researcher used the classroom observation protocol to record the
observation. And after that, on an agreed time and place, each teacher was interviewed
once, one on one, using the interview protocol.

13

Data Analysis Procedure
In attempt to answer the research question of this study, the gathered data from
the class observation and personal interview were transcribed in order to identify how the
teachers addressed the intercultural awareness in ELT classroom of 2013 Curriculum.
And then, by reading each participant‟s transcript, the data were classified into several
items based on the eight questions that have been adressed in the interview. After that,
these items were used to develop a discussion followed by the excerpts as the evidence.

Findings and Discussion
The findings presented in this section covered eight item list that were asked in
the interview. The items were categorized into four themes such as; basic concept of
culture, construction of cultural content, addressing intercultural awareness, challenges
and benefits from addressing intercultural awareness.
A. Basic Concept of Culture
Nowadays culture has increasingly become an important aspect in English
language teaching and the pheneomenon of cutural blending is very interesting to
understand and identify. As reported by Palmer and Sharifian (2007), more teachers are
aware of the need to incorporate the cultural learning into their teaching. Due to this
claim, it is important for us as the academic practitioners to see the reality in the context
of Indonesia at present. In this section, the findings are reported to reveal teachers‟
perception of the definition and the importance of cultural content.

14

Based on the interview, all of the participants were able to come up with their
own definition about culture. Even though the definition was not exactly the same but
PH, AR and NI came up with similar keywords.
“Customs, and practices that have been agreed by school community member,.. life
system to make betterment in life..” (PH)
“Practices and habits from places are different, including the values as the belief in
every place.(AR)

“Habits that have become the spirit of a specific community.” (NI)
PH, AR, and NI believed that culture is related to the practices, habits of a certain
community. These keywords mentioned by PH, AR, and NI were similar with the
definition of culture proposed by Goode et al in 2000. He stated that culture can be
defined as “practices”, “habits”, “customs” and “beliefs” that were related with “ethnic,
religious or social groups”. The resemblance definition of culture between PH, AR and
NI with Goode at al, shows that these participants have an adequate understanding about
the construction of a culture and they are able to classify the complexity and variety of
culture in terms of perspectives (beliefs), practices, and its relation with the sense of
identity by certain community (school community, specific communtity).

Larzen-

Ostermark (2008) mentioned that in order to teach culure efficiently, one needs to be
aware of the meaning of a culture and how it applies in the real-world context. In the
other word, the teachers need to have an adequate level of cultural awareness to
incorporate their knowledge into their classroom pratices.

15

However, an interesting opinion was presented by NP, who said that culture
refers to the human‟s creation that involves the evolution of a community. This
participant did not mention the keywords that have been mentioned by the other
partipant. However, it can be inferred that he sees culture as a product of human creation
that is shaped in a long time and distinguishes one society from another. When
crosschecked with his further response about the importance of culture he stated,
“…culture is the living pattern from a community to survive and create a system for their
society”. This is similar to PH‟s opinion above that culture can be seen as a life system to
make betterment in life. The system may include customs, traditions, values, etc.
Therefore, although his opinion seemed different at first, the essence is still similar to the
other participants‟ perspectives.
Futhermore, the other participants were also asked about their perspectives
toward the importance of culture. Acccording to the interview, all of the participants
agreed that culture is very important in language teaching. Their reasons can be grouped
into two main points, such as the belief that language is a product of culture and by
teaching cultures, teachers can at the same time teach the cultural values to help build the
students‟ characters.
First, they admitted that teaching a cultural content is a must in language
teaching. As in PH‟s view, ““It is important (cultural teaching). Culture need to be
taught to the students, not only in Language learning (English), so the students will not
miss-use the language”. Besides, AR argued that “language is a product of a culture”.In

other words, teachers believed that fail to understand the cultural aspects behind a certain
16

language would lead the students to miss-use the language, since they did not received
cultural knowledge from the target language. This view is in line with the view that
language and culture cannot be separated, and it is almost impossible to present a culture
in academic setting without its cultural background and features (Cakir, 2006; Onalan,
2005). Moreover, AR added

that,

“language is only medium”. In her claim, she

reasoned that language as “medium” to teach culture and the form of a language not
supposed to be the center of language teaching. “we are living with culutre”, she argued,
thus, it is very important to concern and present the culture aspect in language teaching at
the very first place.
The second reason is because by teaching cultures, teachers can at the same time
teach the cultural values to help build the students‟ characters, as suggested explicitly by
NI, he stated that. “because of cultural teaching there will be a lesson about values, such
as discipline and politeness””. This reason were also agreed by NP implicitly, she said

that, “culture is the living pattern from a community to survive and create a system for
their society. In other words, she argued that teaching culture will help the students to

have the sense of adapting and belonging to their own community.

The teachers were also asked about the terms of small c culture and big c culture.
Most of the teachers were aware of these two existing distinctive classifications of
culture and they agreed that from the two senses of culture, they regarded the small c
culture as more important to be taught to their students.

17

The participants made following comments:
“It is mainly to perspective; like they learn by seeing it on their own, like giving
something without hoping in return” NP
“Value (small c culture) need to be taught to the students because it is important for
students‟ character development” PH
“values (small c culture) first, then the culture in a form of products” NI
The teachers‟ reason in prioritizing small c culture probably indicated that the
teachers have strong belief that the students need to have an adequate understanding
upon norms and values at the first place. By this they concerned more about their
students‟ character building, just as suggested in the social competency of the 2013
curriculum. The competency that promotes a character-based learning that expected the
students to be able to adjust themselves as the reflection of the nation in the world
association.
However, there was an interesting idea proposed by NP about the existence of
small c culture and capital c culture. He proposed that both aspects need to be
implemented hand in hand because they are beneficial. He said:
“Both of them are important because they have their own benefits and role”. NP
In line with this, Goode et all. (2000) asserted that culture is an “integrated
pattern” that covers many aspects from small c culture like peserpectives, and capital c
culture such as products and practices. In other words, the existence of small c and
capital c culture are very important. Ideally, the integration of both aspects are important
because they complement each other. However, Indonesian government and the teachers

18

sees small c culture as a precendence that needs to be enforced or deal with first. Thus,
based on its urgency to implement the character-based learning, the reason of prioritizing
small c culture is acceptable and relevant.

B. Construction of Cultural Content
According to the interview, all of the participants have presented almost the same
cultural topics in their class. This may hapenned due to the fact that teachers use the same
book within the same curriculum. AR explained that she always provides the cultural
content in her teaching, as long as it is attached in the textbook. She stated that, “if by any
chance there is a cultural topic in the textbook, I will surely present it in the class” . Her
explanation shows that the teacher concern about the importance of presenting the cultural
content, especially the cultural contents that were attached in the textbook.
The interview also revealed there are some topics that have been agreed by the
teachers as the topic that can be easily integrated with the culture. In general the cultural
topics are taken from the textbooks and also from the social pehomena that happened
nowadays . Topics from the textbooks such as narrative text (fable, legend), recount text,
descriptive text and functional text were being use very often to bring intercultural talk.
Topics were varied, from the social phenomena like habits from certain community (PH)
and family, such as greetings, gotong-royong, community service, and etc.

With regard to this pehenomenon of having as what I called as „almost fixed
cultural topics pattern‟, Gehring 1996 stated that according to his work, the teachers in

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general often use a very traditional, sometimes outdated concepts for themes such as
family, parents, world of work, living, or school that do not display students‟ reality. It is
evident that these topics shown by Gehring resemble the topics that the teachers often
use. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy to point out that these themes are still advantageous
for the students. The rationale basis for this argument lies on its substance and relevance.
First, the substance of these topics can be traced from the relation between the
topics and the reason of selecting it. Table 1 below shown the culture-bound topics that
the teachers have presented in their class.
Table 1.
Culture-bound topics

No

Topics

Examples

1

Sports

2

History of Indonesia

3

Social Skills

4

Hot topics (current issue)

5

Life style

1) Visiting Grandparents during holiday
(Lebaran)

6

Traditional products

1) Clothes
2) Dance

1) Soccer field
2) Vendors
3) Jogging
4) Sprint- run
1) Battle of Surabaya
2) Rawa pening story
3) Bahasa Indonesia
4) Independence day
5) Students‟ own experience that related
to nationalism
1) Honesty
2) Raising hands, politeness
3) Household task
4) Relationship between younger
1) Raising hand
1) TV program: Mata Najwa

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7

1) Peacock – cockatoo
2) Mountain Goat

Flora and Fauna

As we can see in the table 1, most of the topics were aimed at educating learners
in terms of norms and values. This result shows the consistency between participants‟
perspective and their act. The observation results supported the participants‟ interview
responses that they chose the culture-bound topics from the textbook (e.g. the legend of
Rawa Pening in narrative in AR‟s teaching session). During the observation, NI in
Teaching 2 taught students about social skills, such as politeness and manners. NP in
teaching 2 trained students to behave and have etiquette with elderly people. These
themes were substantially fundamental since they reflect the spirit of character-based
learning in the 2013 curriculum.
Second, the relevance of these topics can be seen through the coverage of the
topics that are engaging with trends and social dynamic nowadays. The teachers often
brought up the current social phenomena to be discussed (e.g. TV program: Mata Najwa
and Independence Day in AR‟s teaching session), as Table 2 shows. In addition, this fact
goes along with their responses in the interviews to concern more about local culture or
source culture materials. These two facts about its relevancy shows that the coverage
topics of the themes were not outdated and can keep up with current issues.
Furthermore, Table 2 shown about the culture-bound language items that the
teachers have presented. The table summarizes the language items that have been
presented during the observation.

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Table 2.
Culture-bound language items
Items
NO
1

Sharing information to others about an event in the past

2

Sharing information to others

3

To show proud

4

Command

5
6

Making a request to older people
Warning/ prohibition

Cakir

(2006)

claimed

that

to

communicate

internationally

requires

communicating interculturally. In other words, it is very possible that the students will
face different use of place of silence, tone of voice, appropriate topic of conversation,
and etc. This means that cultural objectives need to be handled very carefuly because it
deals with the authenticity from the culture-bound language items of a certain culture.
In order to avoid the prejudice in teaching culture, one participant said that he
usually does the brainstorm and try to compare the culture differences between the target
language and Indonesian culture as reported in the excerpts from interview below:
“A good example of this, when we talk, in English culture, it is polite if we stare at our
counterpart. On the other hand, it is considered taboo if we do it to elder people in
Javanese culture. We either can not force our counterpart to see us when we are
speaking. Javanese culture is not like that. We only emphasize on good things of English
culture like discliplineship and punctuality. Also, about saying thank you. We are still far
behind English. It is much better to use matur suwun and terimah kasih as often as

English speakers do.” PH.
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Based on the transcription above, we can see the teacher tried to present a cultural
topic in a form of practices. The teacher used the practice of social skill (saying thank
you) from source culture and target culture as the medium to raise students‟ intercultural
awareness. The tacher used cultural comparison in order to avoid prejudice and to
identify the differences and similiarities between both of culture. Then help the students
to understand the value and perspectives behind the practice itself. It is clear that the
teachers aware that they need to make sure that they could adress the cultural content in
the classroom.

Furthermore, the participants were asked which cultural patterns that they
perceived important to be introduced first in the ELT classrooms of Kurikulum 2013. All
the participants believed that the awareness of and knowledge about the source culture
material is more important to be put as the main priority. They further explained that
students need to understand their own culture before understanding other cultures (PH &
AR), and that students should not forget their own culture while trying to understand the
target or international culture (NI & NP); that the source, target and international cultures
should actually go hand in hand (AR & NI).
Supporting this explanation, the observation result also showed that the
participants mostly focused on the source culture than the target or even the international
culture, as can be seen in Table 3. Table 3 summarizes the amount cultural content
presented by the tecahers. The amount of cultural content that have been presented by the

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participants can be seen as the indicator to cross-check teachers‟ perspectives toward the
existence of cultural contents and their action regarding this issue.
Table 3.
Cultural content

Contents

Examples

Source-culture materials

1)Jogging
2) Sprint-run
3) vendors
4) Holiday (Lebaran ),
5) Lunch time, Bali
6) Independence War
7) Peacock and cockatoo
8) Honesty
9) Raising hands, politeness
10) Relationship between younger people and older
people,

Target culture-materials

1)Soccer field.
2)Mountain Goat
3) Korean language

International culture materials

-

The result shows that the source culture materials were fully presented in every
classroom activity with total amount 8 out of 8 meetings. Target culture was discussed
only once out of 8 meetings, and so was the international culture. These findings
represent the consistency between teachers‟ belief and their action to prioritize source
culture materials first. This consistency has proven that the teachers tried to expose the

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students with the culture of Indonesia, following the recommendation in the Letter of
decree by Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia, No. 70 (2013).

C. Addressing Intercultural Awareness
Based on the interview, most of the teachers rely on having a discussion about
culture by using many sources, such as the “5 big genres of texts” (PH & AR), using
puppets or “collectional / series of pictures” to tell a story (NI), and “bring the issue that
hapening in the society into the classroom discussion”¸as mentioned by NP.
Furthermore, based on the observation the teachers were being consistent with
their claim they shared in the interview that they tried to address intercultural awareness
from many sources. As for example, PH claimed that he used texts and anyhing that he
knows related with the culture to address the cultural content. In teaching 2 he presented
a narrative text and conducted intercultural discussion related with the topic. This is one
of the examples that show that the teachers were consistent with their belief and action.
Moreover, there was a pattern that we can see from all the participants on how
the teachers address the culture-bound topics. In general, the participants used
brainstorm, probing questions, sharing information, using AVA, and ask students to do a
role-play in order to address intercultural awareness in their classroom.One of the case
can be seen in RA teaching 2. She used brainstorm to adress culture bound topics. In the
priming stage, RA raised several questions to the students followed by probing that led

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them to do brainstorming. The questions were about their background knowledge related
to the topic. Like in the excerpts below:
“What do you know about peacock? Have you seen them? What comes in your mind
when you think about peacock” AR
Another case, PH used classroom discussion to adress the culture-bound topics. The
teacher also admitted that the attempt to address the culture-bound topics was usually
spontaneous by considering the flow of discussion.
The reasons were varied, like in the excerpts below:
“ English subject has been arranged in a syllabus. Right now, I can not see a particular
topic on culture. What I can do for the time being is to discuss culture things related to
materials because the present curriculum is not a themed based. In our last meeting at
class, we discussed about visiting grandparents. It is a va lue to visit grandparents.” HP

After that, the teacher asked the students to speak out their thought through the
class discussion. Based on the observation, we can see that this section as very rich in
terms of cultural discussion because the students can compare their cultural expectation
with cultural content in the texbook and also the experiences from their peers. These
transfering of information is very important because it creates the awareness of different
culture. Frank (2013), believe that classroom discussion can foster an atmosphere that
encourages EFL students to compare their own culture by using their cultural expectation
and making connections across cultures while studying English. Thus, we can see that
teachers have tried to address intercultural talk in the learning process.

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D. Challenges and Benefits from Addressing Intercultural Awareness
Based on the interview, there were three major points that the teachers believe as
the challenges in addressing intercultural awareness. They are students‟ nature (as L1
user), time management, and teaching materials. First, PH, NI and NP admitted that the
students who come from different background cultures have problem in implementing
practices and habits from different cultures. Hall (1967) explained this phenomenon as a
“cultural iceberg” analogy, in which he claimed that there were parts of culture that
cannot easliy be seen by the people who shared difference cultural background. The
products of culture, such as peacock (AR, Teaching 2), or Bali (PH, Teaching 2) are the
examples of things that we can readily see- because it is only the surface of culture or the
“products” and “practices” (Goode et all, 2000). It is natural for students as L1 user to
face a problem in dealing with the variety of deep culture from target language. This
claim has been proven during the observation, in which teachers often devoted more of
their time to explain the deep culture (perspectives), as revealed in NP‟s teaching 2. NP
spent lots of his time to explain about the persepectives or values behind the relationship
between younger people and older people. In contarst, AR had successfully saved more
time when she explained about peacock in teaching 2, by showing the picture of the
animal. This example st