A new English life

June 20, 2016

Before I came to the United States, I had been teaching English as a Foreign Language for the 12th graders in my home country. My students mostly came from areas far away from downtown. They had never experienced studying English out of school times like many students who lived in downtown. They simply did not have such facilities to accommodate their desires. This condition has created serious problems in the learning process.

My first real experience of teaching English was started at an elementary school near my house, which is in downtown. I was lucky because some of the students I taught, who were only nine to ten years old, also took an extra English class in private English courses. Some of them were very impressive. They knew quite a lot of vocabulary for their age and had excellent grammar as well.

Back to my 12th-grade students, who lived far away from the downtown, contradictory things happened. Great students were very rare. I still can remember a few of my past favorite students since my first-year teaching in that school, which was in 2007. Many times, it was sad and funny at the same time when finding out more than thirty students in the classroom, no one knew the word such as “key” in English, an example of the vocabulary that was supposed to have been very familiar for 12th-grade students like them.

It was even worse when dealing with English grammar. Most of my students still could not use the “to be” correctly. They were not even familiar yet with simple grammatical terms such as “singular” and “plural”. They often confused the plural form “s” with the possessive for “apostrophe s (‘s)” ending to a noun. In short, they needed to study English starting from the elementary level again, which was, of course, time-consuming and extremely challenging.

In addition, most of the students refused to be aware of the importance of learning English. Some of them might even hope that it is not in their school curriculum. They simply did not want to deal with it. Comments on how difficult English is to them often heard even when they were not making efforts at all. Many times, they laughed at themselves when pronouncing some English words. So certainly, they need to be motivated. The lack of facilities and more importantly, motivations always seemed to be the main problems in the English learning process I experienced with my 12th-grade students. However, I also believe that teachers’ competence could be the most crucial factor for development. We will discuss later.

As an English teacher to speakers of other languages, I feel so lucky to have experience studying English as a Second Language in an English speaking country like the United States. In my home country, most of the time I could only practice my English speaking skills when teaching my students. But as I have told you in my first journal, my students could not speak English well enough yet. So, beside practicing my English, I was also practicing interpretation and translation almost all the time so that my students could follow. The question is, is my strategy effective enough? To be honest, I still cannot say yes.

Now, I am a student again, learning English again. It is totally different between learning English as a foreign language and as a second language. I am not only learning the English, as a teacher myself, I am also learning teaching strategies. I feel so lucky about this. Some strategies I have learned during these two weeks are very interesting. I used to deliver the syllabus to my students orally and hardly ever wrote them on the whiteboard. So was about the lesson plan. Since this is the first time for me to experience studying abroad, such a thing as writing the syllabus and teaching agenda on a blackboard is quite new to me. Once, I had heard about that from one of my past lecturers who also did his Master’s degree in an English-speaking country, Australia to be precise. Since it was just heard, not experienced yet, I had not taken the advantage to apply it in my classrooms.

The teachers’ discipline and diligence are also very inspiring. During my career as a teacher, I had been trying my best to facilitate my own self with teaching media such as exercise paper copies, tape recorder, laptop, and lately even my Smartphone was helpful to me for teaching. In order to teach a more accurate English, I could not only rely on textbooks written by Indonesian writers. I really enjoyed the internet by downloading English e-textbooks and books written by native speakers as many as possible. Now, I enjoy buying and having English books on my own in hard copies. I love it so much as I always wanted to have a big library at my house, in my home country as soon as I finish my studies here.

There are still many interesting and inspiring things to enjoy here of course. I do hope to find out more as the days go by. Even when writing this last paragraph of my second journal for Academic Writing class, I know that I still have things in mind to write about how the teachers or instructors here are greatly helpful and inspiring. Thank you.