Grab reading skills to face challenges

By John Phillips

This is the second of two articles on the teaching of English in Indonesian state schools.

YOGYAKARTA (JP): In the previous article, I suggested that Indonesian schools were likely to continue to be ineffective in training students to speak English because the environment in and out of school did not support such efforts and the need for learning was not strong enough.

It is true that some students learn to "speak" English well, but this success depends more on the students than on anything the schools do.

Simply stated, students who learn to speak English do so because they have a specific and continuing need to speak. They have real communicative practice and they have an opportunity to receive guidance and feedback leading to an increase in their fluency.

Unlike most students, they have sufficient resources and opportunity to consciously choose to learn and to succeed. But, this choice isn't easily made by students under the conditions in which English is taught here.

However, it is equally clear that despite the difficulty schools have in teaching students to speak English, an ever increasing number of young Indonesians must learn to use English if Indonesia is going to continue to develop.

The reasons for this great need are apparent to all. Educators know that the students must live in the global village with interdependent economies and instant communication.

Access to information is the most valuable of all commodities. English is the key tool for gaining access to this information, so much so that it is an essential element in any national development plan.

One recent report on CNN (Aug. 24, 1995) about the launching of Windows 95, highlighted the absolute necessity for Internet users to know English well in order to be able to surf the information highway.

Clearly, it is necessary to solve the problem of teaching English in schools. The need is too great and the urgency too immediate to ignore. Nor would it be wise to leave the matter to private schools. These are simply too costly and scarce to succeed on the scale needed.

One answer has already been discussed in the pages of The Jakarta Post, specifically in an article by Ignas Kleden (May 20, 1995) entitled "Is Reading Habit a Cultural Need?" It expressed the many reasons why Indonesians needed to develop "the reading habit" (in Indonesian) as a means of developing Indonesian society since "oral language is no longer adequate as the sole source of information".

In the same sense, teaching school children to read English is necessary since reading Indonesian may not be adequate either. And, given the difficulty of teaching school children to speak English, teaching them English reading skills is the most effective and efficient means for greater numbers of Indonesians to gain access to the information needed to develop themselves and the country.

Numerous researchers in the field of language acquisition point to the importance and efficacy of having a reading program for developing academic language skills including the positive effects such a program has on grammar competence and writing fluency.

Academic language skills are the kinds of skills needed by an individual to process and use information, to analyze and solve problems, and to become more aware and responsive to changes in conditions.

In other words, individuals with good academic language skills are often skilled thinkers and problem solvers able to adapt quickly to changing environment. While it is important for Indonesians to develop these skills in Indonesian first, further developing these skills in English provides students with additional tools needed to access global information. It also supplies an immediately useful reason and context for learning the language. Students who can use language to gather and employ information they need or want have a strong motivation for improving their language skills.

This ability to understand and utilize information, particularly in technical and academic fields, will drive the engine of Indonesian development.

The ability to read English is not only an important cultural habit but also an important social, political and economic skill. Furthermore, an English reading curriculum would be valuable in terms of effective and efficient instructional time spent.

Although a progressive Indonesian reading program is now a major goal, such a program needs many more Indonesian books to be written and published at a time when the amount of information available is much greater than the capacity to translate it.

So, an Indonesian reading program inevitably has certain limits with respect to current academic, technical, scientific and economic information. In contrast, an English reading curriculum in Indonesian schools would have fewer limits and offer many advantages over a speaking curriculum.

First, reading is much more manageable in a school setting: the text can be controlled for level of difficulty, reading aids can be utilized to assist the process, and the specific meaning of the texts can be specified in advance; all of which eases the teacher's task.

The teacher does not need extensive training and the students can work at their own level. The students will be able to acquire a great deal of vocabulary and some writing and grammar skills through the reading process.

There are also far more materials written in English at all levels of difficulty and encompassing every imaginable subject than can possibly be consumed.

It is true that reading a language is not as sexy as speaking one. This may be the reason that the old curriculum which emphasized aspects of reading (grammar and vocabulary) was abandoned.

Properly conducted, however, a reading program can be very effective in motivating students. A student who is able to use language to gather information will be motivated to learn.

Students can then wander far beyond the classroom walls to explore any subject of interest to them.

This will serve the additional goal of better preparing students for more advanced subjects in colleges and universities because many of these disciplines require good English reading skills.

In addition, since it is virtually impossible for readers to keep abreast of developments in a number of fields in any language other than English, the more Indonesian scholars, technicians and scientists who are well trained in English reading skills, the more new knowledge that will be incorporated into Indonesian activities.

Finally, as Indonesians read and analyze more through the careful and concrete medium of reading, they will sharpen their ability to critically analyze ideas and arguments in order to distinguish between the good, the bad and the ugly.

Students who regularly practice critical thinking skills through reading will be better equipped to make intelligent choices about what information and values from other countries are most appropriate for Indonesia. Indonesians will also be in a better position than many native English speakers to compare and contrast ideas taken from more than one cultural context.

Why was this approach to learning English in schools abandoned? The first reason is that reading English is not as attractive or obvious a language skill as speaking it. Speaking English sets the individual apart and elevates his or her status.

The foremost reason, however, is that reading is not as attractive to students coming from an oral culture where the preferred learning mode is not reading.

Quite simply, students don't like reading, because it is something that they usually have not practiced enough, they may not feel it is their best learning mode, and it involves hard, independent work for which there are few short cuts.

In order to learn how to read, they have to read a lot and they have to read progressively harder texts and be regularly tested on them.

Reading is good medicine for what ails Indonesian students. But it is not entirely painless.

Despite the difficulty, the rewards for the individual and society are infinitely greater than the pain.

Those who truly need to speak English will always find a way to learn this skill. They will also find it easier to speak English if they can read English.

The writer is an independent English language, education and cross-cultural management consultant in Yogyakarta.