Multicultural Context in Language Teaching

I have read the journal about the development of the Indonesian teaching material based on multicultural context by using sociolinguistics approach at junior high school published in 2010 by Fathur Rokhman and Yuliati. I learn about the importance of teachers’ awareness, competence and creativity in developing teaching materials especially on multicultural context. As the future teacher, we need more references to understand multicultural education and need to be creative in order to produce challenging material and method, interesting and functional for the students. We are not only have duty to transfer the knowledge related to the social topics but also have responsibility to build students character and develop the society culture site. The language aspect and multicultural aspect are given balance portion with teaching material based on curriculum so that the students can explore the useful multicultural potential in the social life. Beside, based on communicative approach principles, teachers have to balance the four learning skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) or focused on one of the four learning skills. At last, the essence of learning is changing learners attitude from not good condition becomes better condition and improving the learners’ condition from know nothing to know something and improve it.

Linguistics and Education

The summary of Journal

“Pre-service  English  Language  Arts  teachers’  development of  Critical  Language  Awareness  for  teaching.”

by : Amanda  J.  Godleya,  Jeffrey  Reaserb,1,  Kaylan  G.  Moorec.   May 2015.

This journal examines about pre-service English teachers’ (PSTs’) development of Critical Awareness for teaching through an online course focused on language variation. This course purposes to increase PSTs’ understanding of dialect diversity, language ideologies, and linguistic prejudices for teaching. PSTs are support for the value of all dialects and literacy instruction that must be honoured the vernacular dialects used by students and found in literature. It is used to avoid discrimination between the students’ spoken vernacular dialects with the students using Standardized English. In order to effectively teach students having different dialects, teachers need to have basic sociolinguistics knowledge. It includes the understanding that (a)  the  English  language  has  various  dialects  that  are  equally  valid  and  grammatical, (b)  language  varies  in  different  contexts  and  communities  in  systematic  ways,  (c)  language  use  reflects  identity,  and  (d) language  is  often  the  basis  for  judgments  about  people in social affiliation. In Addition, the content of knowledge is not sufficient for preparing teachers to teach well. Teachers must develop pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to explain, frame, assess and evolve the content knowledge for diverse group of students. Sociolinguistics of PCK includes accurately explaining features  of  dialects  and  grammatical  patterns;  evaluating  students’  language  choices; developing  students’  competency  in  Standardized  Written  English;  and  teaching  about  systems  of  power  and  privilege  that  are  maintained  via  language  ideologies. So that, to achieve successful teaching pre-service English teachers (PSTs) must be coupled with learning sociolinguistics of Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).