Review Journal article 9

A REVIEW JOURNAL ENTITLED TEACHING CHALLENGES IN INDONESIA: MOTIVATING

STUDENTS AND TEACHERS’ CLASSROOM LANGUAGE

 By Yuyun Yulia

RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

English language teaching becomes very marketable to students at all levels of education. Hence, the government implements some ways to develop the English language curriculum in order to fulfill the students and teachers needs. For instance, teachers have been trained through pre-service and in-service programs to achieve good quality teaching as well as developing materials in the form of textbooks or online access. Furthermore, it has been many efforts devoted by the government in developing English language teachers’ capacity and students’ knowledge,

Regarding the development of the curriculum to enhance the output of language teaching, it cannot be separated from the socioeconomic milieu of the students. It prominently influenced the students’ motivation towards their learning in second or foreign language contexts. In terms of English language, the motivation issue has been discussed by scholars in second/foreign language contexts. In second language contexts, for example, Gardner (1985) defined motivation as the combination of (1) effort, (2) desire to achieve the goal of language learning, and (3) favorable attitude towards language learning. In addition, the students having low motivation were due to various factors. They are inadequate family support, the local environment and the school context.

The other critical issue in language learning is the teacher’s proficiency in spoken language as the model for students. Nations (2003) stated that learning English in a well balanced foreign and second language contexts is through the four strands of (1) meaning focused input (listening and reading), (2) meaning focused output (speaking and writing), (3) language focused learning (attention to language features) and (4) fluency development (working with known material). He further argued that when learners speak in the same language in class, the use of the first language can be natural easier and more communicatively effective.

On a final note, teacher as the crucial aspect in education must be able to motivate students to learn English in an interesting way. The English language that should be targeted as the teachers’ classroom instruction needed by students is difficult to implement. In fact, ‘language mixture’ seems to dominate the class and the students tend to keep silent. In addition, teachers need to participate actively to develop their teaching professionalism through pre-service and in-service training.