Indonesians fall short in conversation skills

Leo Wahyudi S, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Compared with other Asian students who speak English as a foreign language, Indonesians are among those with an outstanding standard of proficiency in grammar, but lack confidence when speaking it, a teacher said.

Country Director of English First (EF) Indonesia Arleta Darusalam said on Wednesday that Indonesian students were often encouraged to study grammar in a theoretical way, such that they mastered the subject better than their Asian counterparts in, for example, Thailand, Japan, Korea and China.

"The relatively easy linguistics in Indonesian also contributes to our students' achievement in English," Arleta said on the sidelines of an award ceremony for students on the English course.

She said, however, most Indonesian students faced problems when it came to verbal skills.

"As far as I am concerned, many students lack self-confidence in English conversation," she said. "Indonesian students tend to be passive in class and worse still, the instructors or teachers dominate the course of discussion rather than acting as facilitators of the learning process."

The lack of confidence also resulted in the students' lack of enthusiasm for practicing the language in class.

Arleta suggested the use of communicative and interactive approaches to stimulate the students to speak the target language on as many occasions as possible. However, she did not elaborate.

In a bid to encourage students to improve their command of English, EF has awarded two of its 5,000 students nationwide a four-week course overseas. This year the winners came from the South Sumatra capital, Palembang, and from Denpasar, and respectively will travel to London and Sydney in May.

"The most important thing is not the destinations but rather the opportunity for real-life language learning through traveling and fun activities," she said.

There are about two million students learning English in EF franchises worldwide.