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Immersion Week for Meaningful Learning

We acquire language when we understand what we hear and read, not when we don't. We hope that this statement will be reflected on the joint-venture program between Irsyadians and BAIS in two weeks to go. The program is about removing the barriers among international students and local students. On one hand, international students would like to recognise local cultures and get involved more with some local communities. On the other hand the local students have chances to practice their English and exchange cultures among themselves. It is expected that this is an attempt to establish a balance between providing meaningful practice and a useful rationale for improving theoretical awareness and cross cultural sensitivity. 

Mingling with international students will provide local students to communicate actively in the foreign language (English) they are learning – English is still a foreign language in Indonesia. The local students will be demanded to speak English especially those who are less active in speaking. Some of the students are quite active in spoken language with sufficient language ability, some are showing their effort with less language ability, some are less active due to insufficient language ability. Later in the program, they are going to do activities together such as planting trees, playing traditional games and many more. We hope that less active students will activate their spoken language when they really communicate with international students in which English is the only language available for communication. In the grouping later, the local students will be grouped based on the most active (in spoken language) and the less active. The purpose of this grouping is that the less active students will get along with international students without counting on the active students. They will try really hard to make meaning when they talk to each other either verbal or non-verbal language as long as they can do the activities together. Thus, if we focus on the less active students we will see how they can experience meaningful learning.
“Meaningful learning (advised by Novak) refers to the concept that the learned knowledge (let’s say a fact) is fully understood by the individual and that the individual knows how that specific fact relates to other stored facts.” http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~rallrich/learn/mean.html
In this case the less-actively-spoken students will relate all the English language lessons they’ve been learning so far with the real life experience. They are going to practice their spoken English when no other language can be used. In the practice of meaningful learning, we recognize several variables. Firstly, Open work that enable the students to work with different students, Irsyad and BAIS students will have open work for not only practicing the language but also cultural exchanges. Secondly, Motivation will challenge them to have the real atmosphere talking in English and make the students be interested in the activities. They will be motivated to find out more about different cultural background. The third, Environment will make a connection between what the students learn with what surrounds them. They will learn how Gricean maxim works when they communicate each other. The fourth is Creativity that is expected to foster students’ imagination and intelligence through all the activities for example when local students find hard to communicate they will find ways to make meaning. The fifth is Concept map in which the students will find it later when they’ve done it. They will connect the concepts of the theme and the experience when they go through all the activities. They will also learn how different cultures can collaborate together in peace (the theme is “A walk of Peace”). The last is Curricular adaptation where students are introduced to international context as part of their preparation for international test, IGCSE. We hope that this program will cater all those variables and reach the achievement of meaningful learning.

This program is most likely concerning creating real environment of English spoken language used where cooperative principle (Grice) will be the main issue. Speakers shape their utterances to be understood by hearers.

 “A basic underlying assumption we make when we speak to one another is that we are trying to cooperate with one another to construct meaningful conversations. This assumption is known as the Cooperative Principle. “As stated in H. P. Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” (1975)

Utterances are relative to the context of the speech: relation. Speakers try to present meaning clearly and concisely, avoiding ambiguity: manner. Cooperative principle is expected to be used to understand different cultures. We are going to see how it works. Meaningful conversation will only be obtained by meaningful practice of conversation.

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.