Establishing Religiousity Approach: A Critical-Strategic Alternative

An Issue

Every generation is looking forward to the better future generation. That is why we are developing education and school system as well as teaching our children an adequate knowledge and moral value.  The succeeding generation is expected to have knowledge, skill, and wisdom which lead them to their successful life in the future. In relation to this, English language teaching is one of the ways and means to accommodate the national expectation.

Every Indonesian children are dreaming of being able to speak English well. Many of them are wishing to study abroad or to work at international company to pursue the better future through learning English. Nevertheless, the dream of theirs, for most of them, turn out to be traumatic experience since they are not succeeding in learning English. There are some reasonable considerations regarding the causes of this failure.

Firstly, English is likely to be the one of difficult subjects at school.  It is reasonable since there is a systematical mistakes caused by many sides. Naturally, humans are destined to speak language. Therefore, English should not be difficult to learn. There might be fundamental mistakes occurred in the implementation of English education.

Moreover, the failure of English teaching becomes excusable. In reality, parents quite easily excuse their children’s failure who get  low mark of English. In addition, it becomes such an ‘inevitable result’  so that society has little consideration of this phenomenon. Hopefully, this is only a ‘temporary paralysis’ for English education in Indonesia.

Actually, the phenomena above have been long apprehensively recognized.  A number of effort have been made by many sides involving the government (with its policies through general directorate and PMPTK), community college (through many studies and innovative programs), and many experts (with their works and scientific projects)  to offer the solution to this problem. Despite the socialization of new curriculum model and standard, the teachers are reluctant to leave behind the practical teaching which is in fact, ineffective and useless. Hopefully, this problem also leads us to reconstruct our belief (the teacher’s belief) regarding “how to do the best way to teach our students”.

Furthermore, in order to solve the problem above, it is necessary to refine and reorganize the teacher professionalism through the development of quality management system (QMS) as an alternative way. Recently, such program is urgently required by the educational system. The certain approach should be established  to give contribution to the language education.

RELIGIOUSITY AS A BASIS OF LANGUAGE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

Many teacher training development programs did not result in successful improvement. This might have been  caused by ‘teacher’s resistance’ to the new paradigm offered by government. Teachers tend to keep the ‘old practice’ running all the way as it is since they already feel comfortable and ignore the failure of English teaching they have done.

However, the problem always comes up with the solution. One of the ways to make teachers realize the importance of their professionalism is by establishing professional religiousity approach. This approach holds four principles as its fundamental base; they are Amanah, Rahmah, Taadubah, and Sillah (ARTS).

Amanah refers to the view in which a teaching process is regarded as a ‘service’ which will be totally counted in after life. In other words, teachers are supposed to do their best in administering teaching-learning process.  Rahmah is associated with teacher’s affection and patience towards the learning process. Meanwhile, taadubah deals with the teacher’s effort to develop students’ moral excellence. At last, sillah refers to teacher’s ability to plan and develop networking and collaboration among individuals in the classroom.

By implementing those principles, teachers are expected to build real-life competence. ARTS also leads the teachers to do some obligatory phases in teaching-learning process: (1) The teachers are obliged to do modeling as clear as possible, (2) The teachers are obliged to give complete guidance, (3) The teachers are obliged to give students opportunities to perform naturally, and (4)The teachers are obliged to put amanah (trust) on each student.

In conclusion, English may not be the only factor that determine the glorious future of nation but we realize the importance and significance of English well. Therefore, I order to reconstruct English education we need to implement a new paradigm offered by religiosity professional approach. Hopefully, the implementation of this approach will lead our next generation to the brighter future.

Reference:

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

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

Language Learning in Synergetic Concept: The Role of Mother Tongue, National, and Foreign Language

Language learning is one of the fundamental aspect to accelerate the development and advancement of our nation. In reference to the recent curriculum, there are three kinds of language considered as the essential part of educational reconstruction; they are mother tongue, national language, and foreign language.

The first fundamental language to consider is mother tongue. Since the mother tongue is the representative of the physical, social, cultural and spiritual diversity of our nation, the language education should offer a well-constructed mother tongue learning. Mother tongue needs to be taught as a tool to develop the learners’ mind, creativity, and imagination so that they are able to express their feeling, idea, opinion and aspiration well.

Furthermore, national language needs to be taken account as an important consideration of educational reconstruction. National language is regarded as an essential asset of national unity. After the learners have fundamentally acquired their mother tongue, they need to learn national language to get along, to communicate as well as to share ideas with their own nation. Through national language teaching, they need to think together as an entity to develop the national aspiration.

Beside mother tongue and national language, foreign language is very crucial to concern. Foreign language learning should be taught with the provision of identity and pride of the nation. This should be an integrative concept which ultimately promotes the excellence of the nation. Therefore, the process of foreign language learning is expected to contribute the improvement of students’ literacy which is necessary for their personal, social, and professional communication.

In conclusion, there are three languages that are important to be considered; they are mother tongue, national, and foreign language. Therefore, all of them can not be separated in recent educational development in Indonesia.

Reference:

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

Introduction: The Importance of Language

Prof. Dr. H. Didi Suherdi, M.Ed.
www.english.upi.edu

Through this blog, I would like to share my ideas, feelings and opinions related to my field of study, that is language teaching. But as a proverb say "like father like son", most of my ideas are influenced by my formidable lecturer whose name is Didi Suherdi. He is a professor of English language education from the Indonesa University of Education. His main research interest include: English teaching methodology, language teacher education, language in Education, and mother tongue-based multilingual education. In this case, I would like to write brief summaries of one of his book entitled Rekonstruksi Pendidikan Bahasa. This book would be the one of main sources in writing my next posts.

The Importance of Language

Communication has becomes the most essential part of human life. Whether it is verbally or not, people live through communication in order to convey information to each other. Then people need "a device" that is used to deliver the information well. The device used in this process is what we call language.

Languages shape one’s way of think. A language will significantly impact every aspect of human’s life. Therefore, the relationship between language and study, career, social life, and ultimately national refinement will be described briefly.

Thinking is a supreme characteristic of human being. Thinking is simply defined as “self-dialogue within one’s mind”. In other words, thinking is an activity of self-communication with a language. From this perspective, it can be assumed that language proficiency determines  one’s way of think. In relation to the language learning process, therefore,  the better students’ language proficiency is , the better their way of thinking, and the better they learn. 

Furthermore, a language has great significance in people’s career. People’s way of think is determined by their language proficiency. In this case, the language proficiency is the ability to understand the written or spoken information, to write, to give speech and presentation, etc. Therefore, it can be pointed out that those who are able to read, write, listen, and give speech as well as presentation have a greater opportunity to develop their career than those who have poor language proficiency.

Language is also highly related to the social life. A good social life requires communities the sense of understanding and being understood by the others. In order to earn these senses, an individual needs to have a good way of thinking. A good way of thinking requires a language proficiency. Languages help individual to understand the norms accepted at home, school,  work and public places. In relation to this, a language education should contribute to the socialization of people to the norms of their culture. Therefore, language has become an essential part of life. Individual who has a good language proficiency understands and concerns the norms and others’ well being. Through language, it will created a good and harmonious social life.

Finally, languages will determine national supremacy. A country in which the citizens earn their first language as well as second and foreign language might have a better chance to develop and make an advancement for glory and prosperity. Therefore, a national excellence requires a good language education which promotes the society to improve their way of thinking in order to make an individual strive to be innovative and creative as well as to concern the others' well being.

Reference:

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