This sub-section presents and discusses: 1) PSETs responses to questions: Do you think you still need to improve your English proficiency? If so, which skills and why? and 2) The responses of LTEs and MEBs questions: What are the needs of primary school English teachers in terms of their skills? What are they lacking?; and 3) Data from classroom observation sheets on Teachers’ language proficiency.
Evidence from this study reveals that teachers such as PSET7 and PSET8 stated that they need to “learn a lot more” because of their “very limited proficiency” in all areas of language skills (PSET7: 111, PSET8: 204). Data from the observation sheets of PSET7 and PSET8 shows that both teachers did not use English throughout the lesson except when doing listening and repeat activity, which confirms their confession during the interview that they were not confident with their English proficiency. PSET4 pointed out that what teachers need is “formal language that is easily understood by the students” (PSET4: 320). Teachers such as PSET1, PSET2, PSET3, PSET5, PSET6, PSET9, PSET10, and PSET13 all indicated during the interviews that they were not confident with their English skills. Data from the observation shows that, for example, PSET13 tended to frequently pause when uttering a sentence in English and produced some pronunciation errors such as “fiveteen” for “15”. PSET1 made quite a lot of errors in terms of grammar (“listening radio” for which
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he meant “listening to the radio”) and pronunciation (“collating stamp” for which he actually meant “collecting stamps”).
The responses generated from teacher educators and members of educational boards confirm this. MEB2 stated that teachers’ “English is really basic, yeah, a very formal and basic English, which is awkward and not contextual” (MEB2: 102-103). LTE3 pointed out that teachers “in terms of language performance, they need to know the language. They need to be able to identify the structure, what is the structure of English for SD students?” (LTE3: 76-77). Furthermore, LTE4 stated that what teachers need is “particularly their speaking skill, their communication skill, how they actually grade their language, how they paraphrase, how they chunk the language” (LTE4: 85-86). These are all necessary because good language proficiency means teachers are able to identify “adjectives, nouns” and “all the structure we need for students” (LTE3: 84).
Even though “there are many, many teachers who are not confident with their own knowledge of the language”, it is imprudent to say “they are SD teachers therefore their English is not good” (LTE1: 138-140). There is however certainly the case in which a teacher has English proficiency that is “better than an SMA teacher’s English, because they work hard and dig themselves” (LTE1:136-137).
Data from observation provides evidence for the latter argument. Three teachers, namely PSET4, PSET11, and PSET12 were all confident with their language proficiency. They were fluent and did not seem to have major difficulties in expressing themselves in the language. Observation fieldnotes also demonstrate that the grammatical or pronunciation errors that these three teachers committed throughout their lesson were considerably less in comparison to PSET1 and PSET13.
These findings demonstrate that PSET4, PSET11, and PSET12 were well prepared throughout their pre-service education, as opposed to PSET8 and PSET7 who did not receive sufficient English preparation during her pre-service education. The lack of
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confidence in the case of PSET13 also indicates lack of uniformity of pre-service teacher education in providing student teachers with sufficient preparation to improve their language proficiency.
In terms of a language skill that teachers had difficulty the most, vocabulary was indicated as a weakness by PSET13. However he agreed with seven other teachers who perceived oral skill as the main issue. Eight teachers, namely PSET12, PSET2, PSET11, PSET3, PSET13, PSET6, PSET9, and PSET4 placed pronunciation and fluency as an area of weakness. This is evident in the following:
469 : my fluency is very much limited (PSET12)
321 : Yeah, I feel mine is lacking, especially speaking (PSET2) 294 : I think I’m lacking of speaking skill (PSET11)
302 : for me, it’s speaking (PSET3)
249 : it is pronunciation that I am lacking of (PSET13)
300 : To tell you the truth my oral skill pronunciation) is not as good as 301: my literacy skill (PSET6)
79 : Pronunciation is the most important thing
80 : yeah, we really need it, pronunciation, because we teach in SD. (PSET9) 318 : I think I need to improve my proficiency on the four language skills 319 : … especially on how to use the language to talk to children (PSET4)
Data from observation sheets shows that teachers spoke English with thick accent of their local language. This is evident in the cases of teachers who did not graduate from an English department such as PSET2, PSET3, PSET7, and PSET8. Similar problem however also occurs with those who graduated from an English Department such as PSET13, PSET4, and PSET9. Even teachers who graduated with a Bachelor degree in English Language Education with EYL such as PSET11 and PSET12 spoke with a heavily marked Javanese accent. This was most obvious especially because they pronounced most sentences with rising-falling intonation such as “Write your nickname”↓ and “What time is it?”↓
This particular finding demonstrates that the problem with pronunciation appears not only with the group of teachers without an English background (PSET7, PSET8, PSET2, and
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PSET3), but also with those with an English background (PSET4, PSET5, PSET6, PSET9, PSET10, PSET1, PSET11, PSET12, and PSET13). Speaking English with a strong local accent consistently demonstrates a distinctive feature of primary school English teaching in Indonesia. Teachers with weaker proficiency such as PSET7 and PSET8 often pronounced English words with a Minahasa accent. On the other hand, teachers who showed stronger English proficiency such as PSET4, PSET11, and PSET12 all spoke English with a heavy Javanese accent.
Teachers’ lack of pronunciation skill was well observed by teacher educators such as LTE3 and LTE4. Drawing on her vast experience as a teacher trainer, LTE3 in particular mentioned teachers’ flaws when pronouncing words with sounds that do not exist in Indonesian language, such as “cucumber” and “knife”. LTE3 observed that such pronunciation gaffe was found in many areas when she conducted teacher training workshops in West Java:
147 : There are MANY mistakes. “It’s a knife”, in West Java, it was read [knaif], which should be [naif] 148 : “OK, students this is a [t∫ut∫umbér]”
151 : … what they have learnt in SMP and SMA seemed to have no effect for the teachers who 152 : graduated from PGSD (LTE3)
The findings above are parallel to the findings on various studies conducted by scholars such as Agustina, et al. (1997), Suyanto & Chodidjah (2002), Suyanto, Rachmajanti, & Lestari (2003), Lestari (2003), and Damayanti, et al. (2008) that highlighted teacher’s poor pronunciation in various areas throughout Indonesia. Furthermore, the findings also indicate a desire of the participants to become a language model for their students (See Section 5.3.3). Such aspiration is appropriate given the large emphasis that KTSP curriculum places on students’ ability to verbally interact in various meaningful classroom and school contexts (Section 3.2.1). It is apparent that this necessitates the presence of teachers as a language model for their students to allow successful communication to occur. Teachers need to place themselves as a good language model who are able not only to model the language for the students, but also to encourage and motivate them to be able to use the language even when participating in classroom or playground activities.
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However, being a language model does not mean teachers are obligated to having native- like pronunciation, which has actually been argued as a quite simplistic and unreasonable goal of foreign language teaching (Corbett, 2003). Rather, the findings above are best interpreted in an axiom that in order for teachers of English at primary level to become a language model for their students, they must be able to produce adequate and comprehensible pronunciation that is not heavily accented without necessarily ascribing to native-like pronunciation of English.