Learner centered English education

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.