Teaching
English at Junior High School
In
Indonesia, English is
taught in junior
high school, senior
high school, and elementary
school even in
kindergarten. Although English
is not the new
thing for junior
high school students,
in fact they
still have many difficulties in studying English. As we know that English
is not the Indonesian native language. A formal education is done at school in
Indonesia and it has some subjects taught to the students, such as Mathematical
and Natural Sciences, Social Studies, Indonesian language, and foreign
languages. One of the foreign languages learned by the students is English.
Effendie (2014: 1211) English
learning presented at Junior High School (SMP) is more stressed on knowledge of
the four standards of competence or the four language skills, such as,
Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing, without considering the ethical
values contained in that four language skills. It means that the teaching and
learning English
Intansari (2017: 236) Ideally, an
education system should form a coherent whole from the upstream (at the central
level) to downstream (at the school level). In practice, however, the system
manifests differently in different places. Take this as an example: All teachers who participated in the study (100%)
considered students’ good scores as the major parameter used to justify the success
of their teaching. This led the teachers
consciously or subconsciously to teach English to the test. In this case, test has
been one of influential aspects of teaching context.
The teaching of English language currently
is very marketable to students at all levels
of education. In
response to this,
the government has been
trying to develop
the English language curriculum in order to cater for the
needs of Indonesian
society. Teachers, for example,
have been trained through pre-service
and in-service programs to
achieve good quality
teaching as well
as developing learning materials in the form of textbooks or
online access. In brief, much effort
has been devoted
to improve English language teachers’
capacity and students’ knowledge
