ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
Teaching English to speakers of other languages requires
more than just an understanding of the grammar or perfect pronunciation. Using
specific methods and appropriate media, English teachers can better interact
with their students and help them achieve their language learning goals.
METHODS
Many different methods and methodologies exist for the
teaching of English. The variety of methods are differentiated by their
theories of language acquisition and the way the courses, procedures and
activities are structured. But at the most basic level, these teaching methods
will focus on at least one of the following: grammar, conversation (vocabulary)
or conversation (meaning). For example, Latin, which is no longer spoken, is
learned via a focus on grammar. French or German, on the other hand, are more
commonly learned via conversational methods, which are better suited to
languages currently in use.
MEDIA
English is both a verbal and a written language. As a
result, the types of media for English learners can be quite varied. Learner's
textbooks often include non-authentic written materials (materials that have
been created for the textbook) as well as original materials like articles from
newspapers and magazines.
Listening exercises and video clips are other kinds of media
that can be used in or out of the classroom and aid in a verbal and aural
understanding of the language.
Internet and computer-based programs, games, puzzles and
"realia" (objects) can also be used to assist the students' learning.
These kinds of media are quite popular among students, being more
"fun" than the traditional written exercises.
Choosing material for lessons involves knowing your
student's level of English, interests and preferences. Look for materials that
will keep your students' interest, that are challenging enough to be
encouraging but not so difficult that they will become discouraged. Whenever
possible, use up-to-date authentic materials that allow students to see how
much of their knowledge can be used in a real-life setting.
Experiment to discover the methods that work best for you as
a teacher and what media choices are most appreciated (and helpful) for your
students. Enjoy being part of their language learning goals!
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TEACHING (ELT) IN INDONESIA
Penulis/Peneliti :
Dr. Y.M. Harsono
Bidang Penelitian :
Pengajaran Bahasa Inggris/English Language Teaching
Jurnal :
ENGLISH.EDU Journal
Volume :
Volume 5/Number 2 • Juli 2006
Tahun :
2006
Abstract English has been decided to be the first foreign
language in Indonesia. It has been used by most countries in the world either
as first, second, or foreign language. It has been chosen as a language for
wider communication in international forum. In Indonesia, it functions (1) to
help the development of the state and nation, (2) to build relations with other
nations, and (3) to run foreign policy. In relation to that ELT in Indonesia
has been carried out as early as the Dutch period, before the World War II,
starting to be taught in Junior High School called MULO (Meer Uitgebreid Lager
Onderwijs) or extended elementary school. In the recent development of ELT in
Indonesia, English has been taught in the elementary school as an elective
subject since the implementation of the 1994 Curriculum. In the development of
ELT in Indonesia, there are a lot of problems ranging from the context of
learning, the objective of teaching, ELT in the primary school, the method of
teaching, and logistic problems. Possible solutions are forwarded to solve the
problems. Finally, it is suggested that to solve the overall problems of ELT in
Indonesia the government think about the application of ELT in Indonesia as an
optional subject.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN INDONESIA (2)
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING THAT PROMISES SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE
If variety is the spice of life,
than Indonesia has it all. Indonesia is alive with spirit and beauty - where
else will you find such a blend of cultures and religions living with such
zeal? From the buzz of Jakarta's melting-pot of all indigenous cultures to the
pristine rainforests of Sumatra, English language teaching in Indonesia truly
has something for everyone.
COMBINE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING AND TRAVELING
A series of 18,000 islands between
the Asian and Australian continent, Indonesia is a country to be discovered. EF
English First has over 65 English language teaching schools throughout
Indonesia, making it the largest English language provider in the country.
Teaching English with EF will enable you to live near the rice paddies of
Surabaya by week, experience the beaches of Bali on the weekend, and explore
the volcanoes of Mt. Bromo over the national holiday. An adventure awaits you
in teaching English in Indonesia.
TEACHING ENGLISH TO WARM, FRIENDLY PEOPLE
Making friends and getting to know
people is a snap in Indonesia. Teaching English in Indonesia is a great way to
met fascinating new people who you never would have met if you played it safe
and stayed at home. Here, you will be greeted with warmth and a smile. You will
find people approachable and welcoming, and before you know it, you will be
invited into people's lives and homes. If what interests you about Indonesia is
the spirit of the people, then you will not be disappointed; English language
teaching in Indonesia is the job to choose.
ELT COMPETENCES:
· Knowing
how to use language for a range of different purposes and funcionts
·
Knowing how to vary our use of language
according to the setting and the participants (e.g. knowing when to use formal
and informal speech or when to use language appropriately for written as
opposed to spoken communication)
·
Knowing how to produce andunderstand different
types of text (e.g. narratives, reports, interviews, conversations.
·
Knowing how to maintain communication despite
having limitations in one’s language knowledge (e.g. through using different
kinds of communication strategies)
SKILLS:
· TEACHING SPEAKING SKILLS
The Complexity of learning to
speak in another language is reflected in and range of type of subskills that
are entailed in L2 oral production. Learners must must simultaneously attent to
content, morphosyntax and lexis, discourse and information structuring, and the
sound system and the prosody, as well a appropriate register and
pragmalinguistic features.
o
Speaking
Integrated With Other Language skills
§
Speaking
and Pronounciation
The rapid
pace of the internationalization of
English has led to
changing perspectives on
the teaching of
pronunciation. In general terms, the goal of pronunciation
teaching has shifted from targeting a native like accent to targeting
intelligibility, that is the degree to
which the listener understands the
speaker’s utterance. In an age
when English has become a primary
medium for international communication, most cross-cultural interactions
take place between nonnative speakers of English rather than between native and
nonnative speakers.
§
Speaking
and Pragmalingistic Skills
As an additional outcome of
increased global mobility and the internationalization of English, instruction
in L2 speaking skills has been placing a greater emphasis on the sociocultural
features of the communication and oral production. At present, pedagogy on L2
sociopragmatic norms of speaking typically incorporates effective communication
strategies; discourse organization and structuring; conversational rountines
(e.g. small talk); conversational formulae; (e.g. forms of address) and speech
acts, such as requests, refusals, compliments, or
clarification questions. Overview of
several empirical studies
on teaching L2
pragmatics explicit teaching and direct explanations of the L2
form-function connections represent a highly
productive means of
helping learners improve
their L2 sociopragmatic skills.
For example, turn the radio down and could you please turn the radio
down have the
same function (request)
but different pragmalinguistic
forms, and, depending on the context, one is likely to be more effective than
the other. Implicit instruction in various communication tactics
and appropriate language
uses (i.e., when pragmatic features are practiced in context
without descriptions and explanations)
§
Linguistic
Features of Spoken Register
Analyses of English language
corpora, as noted earlier, have been able to identify the specific lexical and
grammatical features that distinguish, for
example, oral and written discourse,
or casual conversations
and formal speech. Noticing
and analyzing divergent
linguistic features
frequently encountered in,
for example, conversations or
university lectures are useful in teaching both speaking and listening
for interactional, academic, or
vocational purposes. In
fact, curricula that attend
to the distinctions between
conversational and formal
oral production can prepare learners for real-life communication in EFL and ESL
environments alike.
§
Linguistic
Features of Spoken Register
Analyses of English language
corpora, as noted earlier, have been able to identify the specific lexical and
grammatical features that distinguish, for
example, oral and
written discourse, or
casual conversations andformal
speech. Noticing and
analyzing divergent linguistic
features frequently encountered
in, for example, conversations or university lectures are useful in teaching
both speaking and listening for interactional,
academic, or vocational
purposes. In fact, curricula that
attend to the distinctions between
conversational and formal
oral production can prepare
learners for real-life communication in
EFL and ESL environments alike.
·
TEACHING
LISTENING SKILLS
listening pedagogy largely
emphasized the development of learners’
abilities to identify words, sentence boundaries, contractions, individual sounds, and
sound combinations, that
is, bottom-up linguistic
processing.
Advances in the studies of
spoken corpora and conversation analysis have
illuminated the complexity
of oral discourse
and language. The findings
of these analyses
have made it
evident that, in
many cases, employing authentic
language in listening instruction can be of limited benefit because of a variety
of constraints, such as the fast pace of speech, specific characteristics of
spoken grammar and lexicon (e.g., incomplete sentences and
ellipses, as in he
did what?), cultural
references and schemata, and
dialectal colloquial expressions.
In L2
listening pedagogy, two complementary approaches reflect current perspectives
on more effective
learning. One emphasizes
the integrated teaching of listening for communication and in conjunction
with other L2
skills, such as
speaking, sociopragmatics, grammar, and vocabulary. The other moves
to the foreground the
learner’s use of metacognitive and
cognitive strategies to
bolster the learning
process
o Listening Integrated With Other Language
Skills
§
Listening,
Discourse, and Linguistic Skills
Generally speaking, a variety of techniques in
L2 listening instruction have withstood the test of time and are largely
recognized as essential, for example, prelistening, making predictions,
listening for the gist or the main idea,
listening intensively, and making inferences. These teaching strategies can be
useful in a broad range of teaching contexts and can meet diverse learning
needs.
Taped (or live) listening selections, such as
academic lectures, can be designed to
concentrate on specific topics and
contents with directed grammar and vocabulary loads, and cultural and discourse schemata,
integrated with reading, writing, and speaking practice.
§
Teaching
Listening and Teaching Strategies
In addition to linguistic and schematic
considerations in L2 listening, a number
of studies identified
the difficulties learners experience when coping with comprehension problems
and making inferences.
Researchers have also been interested in the metacognitive and cognitive
strategies of successful L2 listeners.
·
TEACHING
L2 READING
Similar to L2 listening, L2
reading entails both bottom-up and top-down
cognitive processing, the
prevalent approach to teaching sought to activate learners’ L1 reading schemata
and prior knowledge to foster the development of L2 reading skills.
o Reading Integrated With Other Language
Skills
§
Bottom-Up
and Top-Down Skills
The bottom-up processing of reading involves a
broad array of distinct cognitive subskills, such as word recognition, spelling
and phonological processing, morphosyntactic parsing, and lexical recognition
and access. The reader needs to gather visual information from the written text
(e.g., letters and words), identify the meanings of words, and then move
forward to the processing
of the structure
and the meaning of
larger syntactic units, such
as phrases or sentences.
§
Reading
and Vocabulary
An L2
reader needs to understand
approximately 98% of the
unique words in such
texts as short
novels or academic materials. In
real terms, this
represents about 5,000 word
families (a family is a base word with its related words and
their inflected forms, e.g., child, children, childhood). The vocabulary
range in introductory university textbooks largely overlaps with
that in the general corpus
of frequent words.
o Extensive Reading and Reading Fluency
Development
A pedagogical
approach usually referred
to as extensive
reading (or sustained silent
reading) has been very popular among reading
teachers and methodologists. Extensive reading is based on the
principles adopted in L1 reading and literacy instruction, and, intuitively, it
can be appealing because of
its emphasis on
reading large amounts
of material for enjoyment.
·
TEACHING
L2 WRITING
The learning needs of L2 writers
are crucially distinct
from those of
basic or proficient
L1 writers and that
L2 writing pedagogy
requires special and
systematic approaches that take into account the cultural, rhetorical,
and linguistic differences between L1 and L2 writers.
o Writing Integrated With Other Language
Skills
§
Bottom-Up
and Top-Down Skills
As with L2 reading, L2 writing pedagogy has
begun to pay increasing attention
to the integration of bottom-up
and top-down skills because
learners need both
if they are to
become proficient L2 writers. Achieving proficiency in
writing requires explicit pedagogy in grammar
and lexis and is important
because one’s linguistic
repertoire and writing skills often
determine one’s social,
economic, and political
choices.
§
Teaching
Writing to Young Learners
Along
these lines, the current approaches for teaching L2 writing to school-age
children are similarly
based on the
premise that learners need to attain fundamental
proficiency in spelling and in letter and word recognition, followed by a focus
on the syntactic parsing of morphemes, phrases, and. During the subsequent stages
of learners’ writing development, more complex tasks are introduced to include
emotive (or personal) writing, for
example, narratives that tell
about personal experiences,
letters to friends,
and diaries. Then instruction
begins to
advance to school-based
writing, usually integrated with reading as well as with grammar and
vocabulary learning.
§
Integrated
and Content-Based Teaching of Writing
Much of
the current integrated instruction in L2 writing, grammar, and vocabulary takes place in conjunction with reading,
content-based, and form-focused instruction to improve the overall quality of
L2 prose. For example, to promote learners’ noticing of how particular grammar
and lexis are employed in authentic written text and discourse, teachers can
select readings from a wide array of genres, such as narrative, exposition,
or argumentation. Based
on reading content,
practice in text
analysis can become a
useful springboard for
an instructional focus
on the specific uses
of grammar structures and
contextualized vocabulary.
Instruction can address
the features of
written register by bringing
learners’ attention to the
situational variables of language in context,
such as e-mail
messages, news reports,
or written academic prose, and
their attendant linguistic and discourse
features.
Another integrated approach to teaching writing
together with reading is rooted in the foundations of the systemic functional
linguistics and genre theory that
examines the uses
of language in
texts written for particular, mostly academic and specific,
purposes.
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