Learner centered English education

By Bambang Sugeng

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Modern language education places the learner at the center of the instructional system. All that is done by the teacher must be oriented to the needs and aims the student has in learning English. As, according to theories of modern education, the learner is the one who wants to learn.

In Indonesia, this learner-centered approach to education is promoted by allowing school management to have a 30 percent to 40 percent portion of local content in the curriculum. This article presents a reflection on the current implementation of local curricula.

In the past, language teachers made all decisions concerning what learners needed, or were supposed to need, in studying English.

The curriculum included every language item contained in any standard English textbook. Using the General English (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987) texts, the curriculum content was highly extensive. The idea behind this type of curriculum is for the learner to master English in the same way a native speaker does, and later select items needed for certain communication purposes.

While this principle has a certain extent of validity, the absence of an emphasis on learner needs as the main consideration means the results may not be relevant or practical to the students themselves.

Student and teacher dissatisfaction has thus grown. Complaints are expressed on the wastefulness of English learning in schools. Not everything that students learn all those years is put into use upon leaving school.

In fact, only a small amount of their English learning is used either for continuing their studies or finding jobs. Think of those high school graduates who find they must resort to further test-taking or job interview courses to actually get a place at university or find a job.

So, around the turn of the century, English education theorists turned their attention to more specialized curricula in which only certain items of English were included in the syllabus. Called Special English, these syllabi were developed from careful identification and analyses of learner needs. From this scheme emerged such language courses as English for Science and Technology, English for Business and Economics, English for Engineering and so on. These specialized curricula were more effective as instructional materials and processes were more meaningful to the learners.

The basis for using such specialized curricula is the belief that the learner's needs should be a determining factor in designing course structure. Moskowitz, an ardent proponent of a learner-centered approach to education, insists that modern education should provide the learning environment to allow students to fully achieve their needs and fulfill their potentials (1978). In this type of education, the curriculum content relates to the feelings, experiences, aspirations, beliefs, needs, and fantasies of learners.

Going a little deeper, this humanistic educator maintains that learning should be about discovering oneself, actualizing potentials, and increasing self-esteem and motivation of the learners. All this is about fulfillment of learner needs.

A focal consideration in the emphasis of learner needs is meaningfulness. Modern language education ensures that what the students are doing in the classroom is meaningful to them. What is the point of changing active voice sentences into passive voice, and so on, if the students are not aware why they are doing it?

Meaningful learning also motivates students, which research has found to be a determining factor in the success of learning. From the point of view of syllabus design, concentrating on the needs of learners will make the instructional process more practical and economical. This saves a substantial amount of time, money, and energy for the school, teachers, and students.

An emphasis on learner needs causes teachers to devise strategies to satisfy these needs. A positive result of this is that topics covered in the classroom will be more relevant to the students, and teachers as well. Problems faced by students and teachers and the general problems of society can become the subject for discussion. Many of the inefficiencies in school management can be traced to the fact that much of what the school does is not relevant to society and life's problems.

Since 1994, the Ministry of Education and Culture has answered these demands for education innovation by providing local content to school curricula all the way from grade school to university level. This sound intent must be properly followed by every sector of the educational field, be they administrative or academic. Three conditions need to exist for this policy to take effect.

First, real decentralization of curriculum should be implemented. Schools must be given complete freedom to develop their local content curriculum to satisfy the needs of their learners. Regional offices should exercise less control to enable individual schools to design relevant study material. The fact that the local school management is in a better position to know what is needed by the learners has long been ignored.

The more the ministry directly controls the curriculum, the farther away the school is from satisfying the needs of society. Some teachers have complained that the administrative sector in education management has interfered too much in academic issues. This is not conducive to the decentralization of curriculum control.

Second, more freedom should be given to individual teachers to exercise their expertise in classroom instruction and management. Professional teachers have been trained to develop instructional processes which take into account their skills and attitudes and their students' characteristics. Control over teacher creativity has been a great obstruction to the full functioning of professional teaching. Practices in the field (Retnaningsih, 1998, Sukarni, 1998) show that, when given adequate freedom, teachers are quite keen to exercise their skills to the extent that their teaching produces great results.

Third, the community should be allowed and encouraged to become more involved. Research has shown that parents are concerned with the quality of education given to their children. Concerned parents have ideas that could be invaluable for the development of an excellent local curriculum content. It is not justifiable to involve parents only in cases where the school needs to raise funds. A large number of parents would be quite ready to give suggestions as to what their children need to learn, help teachers provide classroom resources, and guide their children with their home assignments.

The involvement of the community in the management of the school helps education be more congruent with the needs of the community. Kemp, another advocate of a learner-centered approach to education, sees modern education not as an ivory tower, grave and aloof from the community, but more as an institution to help society solve some of its problems (1977).

The time has passed for language education to assume instructional processes provide everything for everyone. Instead, different learners have different expectations in learning English and, therefore, need different treatments.

Local curricula should include content which accommodates learner needs specific to certain regions. Regional and other branch offices of the ministry of education should follow this principle so as not to prescribe what and how teachers should do and behave in the classroom.

The schools should be given more freedom to devise curriculum content which will suit the needs, characteristics, and aims of their learners. Unless learner needs are taken as a determining factor in developing a local curriculum content, not much innovation can be achieved in our education system.

The writer is a lecturer at the English Education Department of the Yogyakarta Teachers Training Institute.