Surviving in Expanding Circle

Triggered by today’s presentation titled "Corpus Linguistic ….” in TEFLIN conference, I keep thinking about the Karchu’s circles of Englishness. The presenter this morning showed the circles as merely background information for corpus linguistic issues. Kachru defined the three ‘circles’ of countries where English is spoken:

•      inner circle circle: UK, USA, Australia, etc.;

•      outer circle circle: India, Nigeria, Singapore (where English is an official language alongside others);

•      expanding circle circle: countries where English is learned as a second language (most others).[foreign language]

Since we are in the expanding circle which is simply equipped with a basic level of English, we find a bit difficult to be equal with the inner circle English as it would never be. The indicator for the equality might involve lots of variables, such as pronunciation and accent, lexis, and may be a test or learning assessment. They are all about EFL teaching and learning variables in most of expanding countries like Indonesia.

In this context, let’s take a look at the assessment in which Indonesia as expanding circle countries has to join internationalized assessment which is created by the inner circle countries. Some inner circle countries set up internationalized test for expanding and outer circles countries to make them recognized internationally for example IGCSE, ICAS, IB and PISA. Although the test has been internationalized yet the level of difficulties for expanding countries has not been recognized thoroughly.

Downing to earth, the phenomenon of RSBI (Pioneering International Based Standard Schools) in Indonesia has not reached any conformity which test they should take to be able to reach international standard. However, some of the schools which so-called “international schools” have not  mostly decided which international assessment they take. Like in my case, the school has designed to prepare for IGCSE for the reason that it is affiliated to Singaporean school which takes IGCSE as well. But when we look at the condition of the expanding circle, apparently it will take couple of years to improve the equalization to the international standard. The preparation to reach the recognized international label has been insufficient not only for “international school” but also for the RSBI schools. There are loads of variables that Indonesia has been through such as the teachers’ professional development, resources, and of course students as inputs.

Some difficulties varied from the mixed-ability students and their level of difficulties, the choice of genre, and the suitable themes. Firstly, in mixed-ability classes, the teachers find hard to decide which material they should choose whether or not adjusting to the higher achievers or to the lowers. Secondly, another complication appears in selecting the genre of the text as it has to be suitable with the text type in the past papers. Finally, the theme has to be adjusted too with the text book as they have been through all the context when they were learning.

Seeing this phenomenon, EFL teachers need to take a deep breath to organize their professionalism, resources and their students.  They are demanded to work extremely hard to find out the best preparation to prepare the school and the students both academically and administratively. It is a long way to go to reach the international standard test for Indonesian schools. That’s why this blog has been created to share any contributions, opinions, comments, suggestions, resources for concerned EFL teacher in expanding circles, particularly in Indonesia.