Everything Changes

I'm changes
Mine too
You're changes
We're changes
When everything changes, just believe in God
Life just once, trust your hearth, do better and be brave

Authentic Materials: The Bridge to the Real Language Use

Materials exist in order to support learning and teaching process, so they should be designed to suit the people and the processes involved. The teachers must be realizing that their purpose is not to teach the materials itself, but they are teaching the students using the materials. There are many kinds of materials such as published materials, teacher produced materials, authentic materials and students materials. Published materials refer to the textbook and course books used by the teacher, then teacher produced materials are the materials that produced by the teacher to bridge the gap between the classroom in the world outside. Other important materials to introduce are authentic materials and students materials. Authentic material is refers to examples of language that were not originally produced for language learning purposes, for example the teacher cut out newspaper and use it in the classroom. There are many examples of authentic materials, such as menus, job applications, voice mail messages, radio programs, videos, etc. The last is student materials, in a two ways it is the learning materials produced by the students and the role of students themselves as the materials.

As a future teacher, we need to expose more about the using of authentic materials, because it can represent the actual goal of language learning including the difficulties that learning materials avoid such as the learners should learn how to respond to language which they do not fully understand and it also increase the motivation of the students to learn more about the use of English in real world condition. The use of authentic materials can also expose the students’ cultural awareness, because they get new and various information about the other culture. In addition of teaching process, we also need to develop our creativity and responsibility in teaching our classroom, because the good materials cannot be understand by the students without balanced by the good way of the delivering the materials itself.

Source: A book entitled essentials of English language teaching by Julian Edge in 1993 page 43-60

Adapting a Turkish middle school textbook to develop cultural awareness

Tomalin and Stempleski (1994) identify three qualities of cultural awareness: awareness of learners’ own cultural behaviour, awareness of others’ cultural behaviour, and the ability to explain their own cultural position, and adopt a task-oriented approach towards teaching culture, where learners cooperate in pairs or groups for gathering, sharing, discussing and interpreting information in view of both the target and native cultures. For this reason, the present activities are designed in such a way that (1) learners in pairs and groups work together to collect information, (2) decide whether the situation is similar or different in their own culture, (3) express their own stance toward the situation by drawing on from their real lives. Consequently, originally a sexist and unstimulating material has been reconstructed by such adaptation strategies as addition, modification, omission, reordering, and replacement, and exploited to resist stereotyping, and to develop cultural awareness and tolerance.

As a future teacher we need to select the appropriate books and materials to teach to the students. The materials in the books itself should balanced between the language proficiency and intercultural competence. Therefore, the teacher can adapt some strategies from this journal to add the cultural content, modify the materials, and omit the unimportant and irrelevant materials and replacement with the better materials in order to achieve the language and cultural needs.

Reference: A journal entitled Adapting a Turkish middle school textbook to develop cultural awareness by Meliha R. Simsek, 2014

Expose the Cultural Awareness Using Authentic Materials

Usually, English language learning tends to focus on vocabulary, grammar, reading, speaking, listening or writing skills. However, in the globalization era the students need to develop their cultural awareness and improve their communication skills. Communication and culture are inseparable and interconnected. Culture determines the way of communication proceeds and how people decipher the messages they get. To achieve the students’ need, teacher should create classroom that provide more opportunities for second language learners and encourage students` contact with the target language beyond scheduled lessons. The teacher can use semi-authentic and authentic materials. Using authentic sources helps to engage students in authentic cultural experiences. Sources can include films, news broadcasts, and television shows; Web sites; and photographs, magazines, newspapers, restaurant menus, travel brochures, and other printed materials. As a future teacher, I want to use the authentic materials in my classroom because it can improve the students’ motivation on learning their second language, exposure the students’ awareness and further the students can improve their communication skills.

Reference: Journal entitled Exposing students to authentic materials as a way to increase students` language proficiency and cultural awareness by Elena Kozhevnikova.

'Biggest invisible thing on earth?' – It's called Indonesia, and it's waking up

I have got some messages from FPCI (Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia) and this is the most interesting one. 

by: Elizabeth Pisani

Looking for fun on a rainy afternoon? Try this: take a blow-up globe down to your nearest public space – a shopping mall, perhaps, or a train station – and ask people to find Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation.

I’ve tried it in London, New York and Rio. The response: “Uuuuuuuhh …”

Much stroking of chins and scratching of heads. “Somewhere around here, maybe,” accompanied by vague hand gestures towards Indochina or south Asia.

If you’re in Melbourne or Sydney you may have more luck. But even there, interest in Indonesia per se is muted. In the words of an editor at Penguin Australia: “Despite [Indonesia] being a profoundly important near neighbour of ours, I feel our market would need an Australian angle on the country.”

Despite being a country of superlatives – most populous Muslim-majority nation, biggest exporter of numerous commodities dug or grown out of its generous earth, one of the world’s most enthusiastic users of Twitter and Facebook – Indonesia also remains, in the words of Indonesian businessman John Riady, the biggest invisible thing on the planet.

This is despite the cheerleading of brokers and business consultants who point to Indonesia’s young population, its rapid urbanisation and its huge market of enthusiastic consumers as reasons for foreign investors to pay it more attention.

I’ve been hearing those same arguments since I first covered Indonesia for Reuters and the Economist in the late 1980s. Over the intervening three decades, per-capita income in Indonesia did indeed rise steeply to $3,300, over five times its level when I first lived there.

Which is great, but not as great as Thailand or Vietnam (between seven and eight times higher), let alone China (where per capita income is now close to $8,000 a year, 26 times its 1985 value).

For a country that has such extraordinary natural resources, and such an abundance of labour, Indonesia is arguably underperforming economically. This is in part because the scatter of its 7,000 inhabited islands creates extraordinary infrastructure challenges, in part because a torpid bureaucracy squashes innovation, and in (large) part because Indonesia’s miasmic legal system means no contract is secure.

The much vaunted “demographic dividend” will not deliver the pot of gold at the end of the Indonesian rainbow until all three of these things change. Now, for the first time since a brave but ill-prepared Indonesia declared its independence from Dutch colonists in 1945, at least two of these changes are under way. That’s no small achievement in a nation as kaleidoscopic as Indonesia, where there are almost as many ethnicities, languages and belief systems as there are islands. The improvements in both infrastructure and governance are especially worthy of global attention because they are being propelled by the twin engines of democracy and decentralisation, both relatively new to Indonesians.

Having lived through 45 years of virtual dictatorship, Indonesians are now rowdily democratic, directly electing everyone from their village head up to the president. Some politicians still hand out cash for ballots, but Indonesian citizens even in the remotest villages have a remarkably acute understanding of the twists and turns of politics.

“They think we’re idiots, that they can buy our votes,” commented a fisherman in North Sulawesi last month of the politicians who are already campaigning ahead of next year’s district elections. “Of course we take the cash, we’ll take it from all of them, but we vote with our heads.” Political elites who expect bribery or blind populism to trump all else in Indonesia are often left flummoxed, and, increasingly, out of power.

Indonesia’s democratic rebirth came with what some see as a second wave of decolonisation. For the first five and a half decades of its existence, the nation was firmly ruled from the capital Jakarta, largely for the benefit of the 60% of Indonesians who are squashed in to the single island of Java.

The resentment this caused contributed to the 1998 downfall of the country’s second leader, Suharto, after 32 years in power. There followed a “big bang” decentralisation that turned Indonesia’s many geographic, cultural and ethnic fiefdoms from vassals of the central government in Jakarta into quasi-autonomous democracies.

Among the many votes Indonesians now cast, the one that affects their lives most directly is that for district head or mayor. Voters laughingly refer to these local potentates as “little Sultans” because they are so powerful. They make most of the important decisions about education, healthcare and local infrastructure; they dole out jobs and contracts, regulate entertainment, and negotiate the transport routes that are all-important in an island nation.

Though Indonesia’s current president, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, has made much of his support for infrastructure development, it is driven less by a well-planned push from Jakarta than by active demand from politicians directly elected in district and provincial governments. Though progress is slow, those demands are gradually overcoming the hurdles raised by the country’s geography.

Decentralisation has had an effect on innovation-squashing bureaucracy also, though not all of it good. In many areas, district governments have simply pasted cumbersome new layers on to an already dysfunctional administrative system.

But in a few districts, adventurous politicians have experimented with radical reforms: they require civil servants to show up on time, to treat citizens with respect, to do their jobs without being bribed. These individuals have become local heroes and media darlings: their popularity has in many cases provided a springboard to higher office, including the presidency. Jokowi rose from small-town mayor to governor of Jakarta and on to the presidency on the strength of his no-nonsense approach to local government.

However, neither decentralised democracy nor Jokowi himself have managed an assault on the third major hurdle to Indonesia’s self-actualisation: the legal quagmire referred to by his predecessor as the “judicial mafia”.

The judiciary, still bruised after the 2013 conviction on corruption charges of the highest judge in the land, will be in the global spotlight again as it considers a blasphemy investigation opened against the Jakarta governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok).

If he is charged, a transparent trial and a fair verdict would signal the beginning of improvements in the legal landscape. That, more than anything, would make Indonesia a country to watch in eager anticipation of a destiny of global greatness soon to be fulfilled.

Elizabeth Pisani is author of Indonesia Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation

Internationalization at Home

Internationalization in higher education is important for developing students’ language proficiency. Many students is going abroad or learning in language institution to develop their English language proficiency. However, those activities need much money and require extending the study period. So that, the efficient ways to develop students proficiency is motivating the students to learn Internationalization at home.  As the instructor, teacher should lead the students in enhancing their motivation and self-conception in order to maximize Internationalization at home. Teacher gives the students task that will help them to learn at home. Teacher supply the students log activity to know their learning activity at home. By doing this activity, teacher can understand the students motivation and give them good respond to improved it.  At last, Internationalization at home can be done effectively if the teacher be a good educators that lead the students to motivate and develop their English language proficiency.

Reference : Internationalization  at  home:  Using  learning  motivation  to  predict students’  attitudes  toward  teaching  in  a  foreign  language by Julia  Gorges, Christian  Kandler, Gerd  Bohner

Internationalization in Elementary School, Why Not?

In line with the needs of facing globalization, we realize that internationalization is one of the important things that need to be done. Internationalization is not only can apply on higher education but also can be started from elementary school. At the elementary school level, the intention and focus of international education are to motivate the students in knowing their own cultures, expand students’ international knowledge and improve students’ foreign language communication skills. In this case, teacher can establish a school-wide foreign language learning environment, integrate international knowledge into the curriculum, hold frequent study tours and join a variety of international competitions. In fact, to teach elementary school students about culture and foreign language skills is not easy. That’s why as a future teacher we need to improve our competencies through creating fun learning environment that can foster the students to learn foreign language in emphasizing the internationalization needs.

Reference : A journal entitled A Comparison of the Internationalization of Education in Taiwan and Japan: The Perspective of Elementary School Principals by Ming-Huang Lin & Shan-Hua Chen.