The Importance of Student's Character Building

THE NATURE AND ROLE OF CHARACTER IN LIFE

In order to promote the advancement of our language education in the basis of national excellence, we need to take account of character building. Character means personality in certain ways. However, we do not focus on making clear distinctive of those terms but we considerably put them as the backbone of our education. Without a good character building, an education will collapse like a human without backbone. Likewise, language education may not result in goodness and beneficence if students’ character building are not settled firmly. Therefore,  teachers are supposed to value moral excellence in learning activity.  Students are taught how to do every single activity honestly and responsibly. Then, they have to always bring righteousness and objectivity in making decision of their life. As a result, generating such individuals will lead our nation to achieve the noble and supreme goal which is glory and prosperity for every people.

BUILDING STUDENTS’ CHARACTER THROUGH SCHOOL EDUCATION

Building character requires comprehensive and ongoing efforts that demand the highest participation from the entire school member, educational institution, and the society. Practically, in the school level, the principal and school boards are responsible to provide a conducive environment for the emergence of positive character of the entire school member. For example, the school principal generates the regulations which rules the way members should dress; the way members communicate to each others; the procedure of using school facilities, etc. On the other hand, the classroom teachers bring forth classroom regulations such as establishing classroom management which concerns the cleanliness and neatness of the classroom. Then, the teachers promote character building aspects through the learning process for each subjects. In addition, school should ensure that the entire curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular activities run very well. At last, such activities will create a leading and religious generation.

BUILDING STUDENTS’ CHARACTER THROUGH LANGUAGE EDUCATION

As we know that students have different needs and character. Language teachers are supposed to teach any subject matters well in any classroom circumstances. It might be easy to teach a class which comprises a conducive learning process.  Then, it is challenging for language teachers to discuss how to deal with “a noisy class” and put moral values within the classroom.

A successful model of language teaching done by Suherdi (2009)  gives us an insight into the way we face different kind of classroom circumstance through a series of phase. In this case, he tried to teach descriptive text which is illustrated briefly as follows:

• The class was begun by performing a small talk about tourism places around West Java. This step had successfully arouse students’ interest since the topic was related to their own culture.
• The grammatical errors and irrelevant answers were neglected temporary in this process. In fact, this strategy had successfully fostered students’ participation. Moreover, the students who usually caused disturbance had no opportunity to interrupt the classroom activity.
• While performing dialogue with students, certain model of expressions were written on the white board to give them guidance to develop their own descriptive text.
• Students were not directly asked to share their work in front of the class. In this case, the teacher is not supposed to force students’ verbally or non-verbally to do that. A model of descriptive text should be given earlier by the teacher instead. This phase created comfortable atmosphere of learning in which the students gained confidence to perform their task voluntarily.
• Students were asked to work together in group and made a role play in which a tour guide explained some tourism places to the tourists. All of them now, had a same opportunity to share their works each other.

CHARACTER BUILDING ANALYSIS

Through the series of the phase above, the classroom interaction and students’ participation were successfully fostered. Individual task given helped them to be independent and honest. Meanwhile, group-work task raised students’ character of creativity, confidence, and visionary. Despite the ignorance of grammatical errors, the conducive learning process was created and this atmosphere will lead to the better process in the future time.

Reference:

Suherdi, Didi. (2009). Teaching Oral Descriptive Texts in Senior High School. A video-recording on the teaching of a descriptive text in an SMA in Bandung.

Suherdi, Didi. (2012). Rekonstruksi Pendidikan Bahasa: Sebuah Keniscayaan bagi Keunggulan Bangsa. Bandung: Celtics Press