Flawed system in English teaching

By Setiono

JAKARTA (JP): The pendulum of the English language teaching curriculum in Indonesia has swung from one extreme of opinion to the other. Once it much favored the "audio-lingual" approach when it was recommended by the government for the 1975 curriculum and implemented in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL).

However, due to its shortcomings in providing the necessary conditions for the acquisition of communicative competence in learners, this approach was then no longer deemed to reflect our English teaching methodology. As a result, the communicative approach, which was originally derived from the work of the Council of Europe, has become a fashionable term in English language teaching in Indonesia and was recommended in the 1994 curriculum.

This approach has profoundly influenced current thoughts in the development of the 1994 curriculum and syllabus design, and to a lesser extent, in the methodology of teaching English as a foreign language in Indonesia. One of the basic features of this approach is to provide the learners of English with the ability to communicate in an appropriate situation as well as in an actual and purposeful context.

What is the current practice of English language teaching in Indonesia under the influence of this approach?

In his first article published in The Jakarta Post on Dec. 8, Dr. A. Chaedar Alwasilah mentioned a poll on the practice of TEFL in Indonesia. He polled three groups of respondents representing different levels of education. They included junior high school (SMP) teachers, Islamic high school English teachers, graduate students and English lecturers at Bandung's Teachers Training Institute (IKIP) English department.

From his observations Alwasilah concluded that the implementation of the 1994 curriculum (which is based on the communicative approach) has failed in developing English proficiency in students because the communicative approach is not well understood by school teachers. In other words, he means that this failure is caused by school teachers' insufficient knowledge of the communicative approach.

It is, however, unwise to address English as the sole factor causing the failure of the implementation of the 1994 curriculum. Alwasilah seems to have lost sight of the fact the there are abundant variables causing obstacles in implementing the communicative approach in Indonesia. Here I shall list the chief obstacles:

The ultimate objective of teaching English in Indonesia is to equip learners with reading ability (receptive skills) instead of speaking and writing (productive skills).

This objective, of course, brings about methodological consequences. In terms of teaching-learning interaction, class activities are devoted mostly to reading a text and answering questions based on the text.

In the light of testing (for instance, the final nationally held evaluation known as EBTANAS), as an indispensable tool of teaching, it has been noted that questions are always notoriously in the form of multiple choice, which does not totally measure a learner's productive skills.

Teaching using the communicative approach, however, requires teachers to expose their learners to performance of the language both in productive spoken and written forms. It is obvious, in this case, that our language teaching system has misperceived the concept of the communicative approach.

A sociolinguistic setting is another variable that impedes the implementation of the communicative approach. Our learners of English have limited frequency and little opportunity to practice the language as their environment does not support this. Considering this sociolinguistic setting is crucial as it leads to motivational variables which eventually influence language learning as required in a communicative approach.

The size of class is the third variable that has been notoriously associated with the problem of implementing the communicative approach in Indonesia. It is well known that the average class has too many students, usually 30 to 40. This condition is, of course, undesirable for conducting an effective communicative class, which calls for a small number of students.

The final factor which has received little attention from Indonesian teaching specialists is what Jack C. Richard and Gloria P. Samson (1974) call the "universal hierarchy of difficulty". This factor is concerned with the inherent difficulty in certain phonological, syntactical or semantic items and structures. Some language elements may be inherently difficult to learn regardless of the background of the learners.

From the above discussion, it can be inferred that the failure of the implementation of 1994 curriculum is not caused merely by the linguistic factors (English teachers' insufficient knowledge about the communicative approach), but also by nonlinguistic factors.

The contradictory perspectives between graduate students and English lecturers and junior high school teachers regarding the practice of the communicative approach also brought Alwasilah to the conclusion that the communicative approach has been relatively successful at certain levels of education. This conclusion is, I think, exaggerated for at least two reasons.

First, Alwasilah does not mention the criteria used to assess the relative success of the implementation of the communicative approach. Nor does he specifically mention at what level of education the communicative approach can be successfully implemented. His conclusion is therefore questionable, and cannot be justified. As far as my English teaching experience at elementary level is concerned, teaching using the communicative approach alone is inadequate to make learners communicatively competent.

The communicative approach per se still suffers from several drawbacks that I will discuss later. Second, Alwasilah seems to take for granted the opinion asserted by his respondents without taking into account the nonlinguistic factors (described earlier) that might potentially hinder the implementation of this approach.

To conclude, Alwasilah's observation regarding the implementation of the communicative approach, which is basic in the 1994 curriculum, appears to be biased since he only asked his respondents' opinion and failed to empirically validate his conclusions.

Nonetheless, Alwasilah's suggestions of putting TEFL in the framework of national language planning and to revise the currently employed curriculum ought to be highly appreciated although there is much resistance related, particularly, to the former. Endeavors to include TEFL in the national language planning can be carried out successfully provided that the central authorities no longer maintain their sentimental attitude towards foreign languages, especially English.

In the light of the 1994 curriculum, that which employs the communicative approach, immediate action to revise it is essential. Our language teaching curriculum designers just simply adopt the communicative approach without being fully aware of the fact that there are essential drawbacks to it. They are:

Communicative approach overemphasizes the teaching of such language functions as greetings, informing, asking for infor mation, apologizing, etc., and neglects to develop an awareness of the communicative potential of linguistic forms. In our understanding, effective communication entails not only sociolinguistic appropriateness but also linguistic accuracy. Inaccurate performance, even it is perfectly appropriate sociolinguistically, can never be really effective as communication.

In the communicative approach language functions are taught as "frozen phrases" and require the learners to memorize them in order to use them appropriately. The danger of this type of teaching is that learners may be unable to handle the language they learn in a longer, connected discourse.

Communicative approach utilizes the so-called "analytic teaching strategy", as opposed to "synthetic teaching strategy", though there are doubts regarding the validity of this distinction. In the analytic teaching strategy grammatical points are taught implicitly and integratively within the language skills. Nevertheless, not all grammatical points can be presented integratively; certain grammatical points (such as impersonal "it", subjunctive, conditional "if", to mention a few) present difficulties of integration. Such grammatical points undoubtedly need explicit explanation.

Given the above shortcomings of the communicative approach, it can be deduced that the 1994 curriculum cannot be considered successful in its attainment of communicative competence as its ultimate objective, and attempts to revise it are mandatory.

Communicative competence, according to Canale and Swain (1980), must entail the following components: linguistic competence which refers to the mastery of the language form, sociolinguistic competence which is concerned with the sociocultural rules of use, discourse competence which deals with the appropriateness of utterances to their linguistic contexts, and strategic competence which is a compensatory element that enables a speaker to make up for gaps in his/her knowledge system or lack of fluency by means of "communication strategies".

In conclusion, it is apparent that in order to be called a communicatively competent speaker, one has to possess not only sociolinguistic competence, but also linguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. It is the last three mentioned communicative components that have been ignored in the 1994 curriculum.

Above all, the above components of communicative competence are worth consideration as a parameter in revising our current English teaching curriculum.

The writer is a teaching staff member of the English Department Faculty of Education, Atmajaya Catholic University, Jakarta.