Foreign language study on the decline in city schools

JAKARTA (JP): More than 100 qualified German language teachers in Jakarta's senior high schools are teaching everything but German, an officer of the city's education and culture office said yesterday.

Henny Liestiana of the city's office, who chaired a conference on German language teaching yesterday, said the teachers were now teaching subjects like sociology and history even though they may not have mastered them.

She said the cause of the problem was that since the introduction of the 1994 education curriculum there have not enough students willing to take a second foreign language at school.

According to the new curriculum, students in social science departments no longer have to take a second foreign language.

The only students required to take a second foreign language are those in language departments, she said.

And the ministry requires that at least 12 students must indicate they want to study languages before a school can set up a language department.

Henny said that it was difficult to get these numbers.

"Most students are not interested in languages," she said.

Many people wrongly assumed that there was no future for students who chose languages, she said.

"In fact, mastering other languages is essential in the global era."

Henny said that of 527 senior high schools in Jakarta only 50 had a language department.

Henny was speaking yesterday at a press conference on "German Language in the Global Era" put on by the Goethe Institute Jakarta in Central Jakarta.

The head of the institute's language teaching section, Henning Schroedter-Albers, said Indonesia had about 200 German entrepreneurs, factories, institutions, all needing employees who speak German.

Schroedter-Albers said that to promote interest in the language, the institute had awarded scholarships to senior high school teachers, had trained German language lecturers from 10 teacher training institutes throughout the country, and run short courses in three universities.

It also provided student scholarships, he said.

In 1997, 80 Indonesian postgraduate students are studying in Germany through the German Academic Exchange Service. (ind)