Lament for minor languages

By A. Chaedar Alwasilah

BANDUNG (JP): All countries have their own language policies to ascertain that the languages used facilitate national development. In the case of Indonesia, language planning should address three different areas -- the national language, ethnic languages and foreign languages, especially English.

The 1994 curriculum is an inseparable part of the national language planning. In most cases, language planning is a government-sponsored, long-term, sustained and deliberate effort to solve communication problems in all walks of life; social, political, economic, educational and cultural.

As a country of diverse ethnic groups and hundreds of minor languages, Indonesia is highly vulnerable to national disintegration, a concern shared by the founding fathers of the nation more than 50 years ago. The motto Bhineka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) as they aptly proclaimed then, was a genuine indication of sociolinguistic as well as politicolinguistic awareness. The present politicians and power holders should develop awareness of language problems as the founding fathers demonstrated.

Many times bureaucrats are criticized for their sloppy use of Indonesian and retort saying that language problems are to be left to language specialists. This naive attitude shows a lack of appreciation and understanding of the function of language as a means of political and national development.

The rights of ethnic languages are recognized in the 1945 Constitution, saying that these minor languages are to be developed and protected by the government. They are still widely used in the family, social and informal gatherings, and sometimes even in formal settings.

However, in the cities where various ethnic groups mix and interethnic marriage is common, the use of these ethnic languages decreases. This phenomenon suggests that the more urbanized and industrialized the country is, the more developed and cultivated the national language, and the less developed and protected the ethnic languages become.

As the 1928 Youth Pledge signifies, the Indonesian language has long been elevated to the position of the national language at the cost of the minor languages, suggesting that politically, no matter what, Indonesian takes precedence over the minor languages. When Indonesia is committed to modernization and industrialization, leaving agriculture behind, Indonesian is elevated to the status of the language of industrialization besides that of a national and state language.

The minor languages, as they lack vitality for transferring industrialization, become less significant. The corollary goes that nationally speaking, the more industrialized the country is, linguistically the more homogeneous the country tends to be.

With the free market policy era approaching, the mastery of foreign languages, especially English, is imperative. We are now then witnessing the scene where English vis a vis Indonesian and minor languages compete.

It seems to be the case that this linguistic competition parallels economic and cultural competition as part of global competition. By no means will English take the position of a national language -- a phenomenon common among members and former members of the British Commonwealth such as India and Singapore.

However, people now have come to realize that to anticipate and survive globalization, learning English is much more useful than learning the minor languages. This fact suggests that due to globalization, the vitality of minor languages is gradually decreasing.

It is reasonable to argue that the best way to study language planning in a particular country is to review its language curriculum, simply because the curriculum reflects the government-authorized means to provide students with opportunities for mastering language(s). To survive the ever- changing times, the curriculum needs to be evaluated and revised.

Whatever we are offering in our schools today, it will define the language competence of the next generation. When we are concerned with nationalism and globalization, our language curriculum should then provide students with language competence relevant to nationalism and globalization.

Long before the 1994 curriculum was implemented, parents in big cities for various reasons enthusiastically encouraged their children to take English courses at private schools. As a result, English classes for children turned up everywhere.

Noticing this tendency, the government considered it necessary to evaluate and revise the old curriculum and to introduce the 1994 curriculum, which officially allows elementary schools to offer English as a school subject under the umbrella of so-called "local content".

Under the local content policy, the school may offer a local language, traditional arts or English, provided that the school manages it. On the one hand, the policy necessarily reflects the government's commitment to monitoring if not supervising the practice. However, this is not the case.

My 11 year-old daughter was excited to learn English for the first time and was eager to do the homework. My pride, however, soon faded away when I knew that her first assignment was to identify the subject and the predicate of the sentence. The teacher -- whom I later found out was a volunteer and non-English major -- apparently does not understand the psychology of teaching English at the elementary level, let alone the principles of communicative language teaching, an approach being promoted nationally by the government.

The illustration above is evidence that in many schools, the teachers, headmasters, parents and students are jumping upon the bandwagon, without realizing that the local content policy challenges professional accountability on the part of teachers, headmasters, school curriculum developers and the National Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia (TEFLIN).

English should be taught by certified elementary English instructors. Otherwise, our kids become a victim of emotional rather than professional ambitions.

Presently most elementary teachers are grade teachers instead of school subject teachers. The fact of the matter is that the schools are not ready to offer English as a school subject.

Apparently, the government has failed to anticipate this problem. Trained elementary English teachers should have been made available before the curriculum was officially implemented.

The office of regional education should be responsible for monitoring the schools on whether they employ professional teachers. We could not assume that Teachers Training Institute (IKIP) graduates are professional enough to teach at the elementary level, simply because their major is English education.

It is high time IKIPs -- especially state IKIPs -- opened at least two year diploma English education programs that train students to be elementary English teachers, otherwise English teaching at the elementary level will go uncontrolled and unmonitored -- a fact that is contradictory to the function of language planning, that is, a government-initiated and conscious effort to improve the quality of language education.

Language planning is conscious language management. To be successful, language education should be planned in a systemic way. It should pervade all levels of the system: Classroom settings, teacher training, textbook and material development, and local as well as central government.

The teaching and learning of English in elementary schools should seriously consider the nature of learning a foreign language, the instructional system and the governance system that governs the whole language educational system. Such an approach to language education involving ethnic languages, the national language and foreign languages is indeed radical, difficult and risky.

Are we serious about language education? Without such an approach, we will almost certainly be condemned to a language education system that does not fulfill our students' needs.

The writer is a lecturer at the Teachers Training Institute (IKIP) of Bandung, West Java.