[This paper is presented in Eight International Conference “ Internationalisation in Education: Implication for ELT in Indonesia” ITB Bandung Indonesia 20th– 22nd 2010].
Alfan Zuhairi
Bilingual education has been tried out in some selected Secondary Schools in Indonesia. Some schools which are ready with human resources and facilities to implement bilingual education are recommended to be International Standard Schools (SBI) by the local government. As a consequence, the schools send their non English teachers or subject-matter teachers to reputable English courses to learn English. For teachers there are two basic competences which they should have. They are English language competence and competence to teach the subjects. The former refers to the speaking ability used as medium of instruction and the latter refers to the ability to deliver the subjects through English. I propose two basic competencies which the teacher should have and develop as an on-going process. They are competences of applying strategies to motivate the students in the classroom and of applying effective reading techniques such as summarizing and text mapping.
Key words: motivational strategies, summarizing technique, text mapping technique
Introduction
The program of International Standard schools as planned by the Indonesian government now is being implemented in some Junior and Senior High Schools. As consequence of this policy the schools have to give their subject matter teachers such as teachers of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and economics a chance to study English in some reputable English courses. This policy is aimed mostly at improving the teachers’ competence in English speakingto be used as medium of instruction in the classroom. However, the other English language skills, which are needed, are also studied like reading and writing skills.
Teachers play a very important role when they stand in front of the classroom. The students’ success will depend very much on the way the teacher manage the classroom activities. It is the teachers who are responsible to create the classroom atmosphere to make the students learn actively and surely. In other words, it is very significant for the teachers to keep the students on task by providing them with opportunities for meaningful interaction (Gabhard, 1996). Likewise, Harmer (2008) also states that one of the most important tasks that the teachers have to perform is organizing the students in various activities. This often involves giving the students information, telling them how they are going to do the activities, putting them into pairs or groups and finally closing things down when it is time to stop. The first thing which is indispensible in organizing the classroom is to get the students involved, engaged, and ready to follow the teaching and learning process.
In fact, non-English teachers need two basic competences to deliver subject matters through English. On one the hand, linguistically they have to make the language used as a medium of instruction comprehensible to the students, on the other hand, they have to make the content of the subjects understandable. In sum, while delivering subjects through English, the teacher must not sacrifice either the language or the subject matter.
It is, of course, not easy to gain both teaching objectives simultaniously. The teachers have a very hard duty to do. Using English as medium of instruction, which is originally not their main business, becomes their invitable challenge now. Moreover, there is another skill needed surely in teaching subject matters through English in order not to make the students have low motivation caused by the teachers. That is a strategy to motivate the students during joining the class. This paper is offered to the non English-teachers and hopefully they can take advantage of the practical idea brought to the classroom. The offers cover the strategies to motivate the students in learning the subject matters through English, the summarizing technique and the text mapping technique.
Motivation in language classroom
There have been many definitions of motivation viewed from different perspectives. Linguistically, motivation is the extent to which ones make choice about (1) goal to pursue and (2) the effort devoted to that pursuit (Brown, 2001). Similar to the definition, Richard, Platt, and Platt (2002) define that motivation is the driving force in any situation that leads to action. From the definition, it can be inferred that motivation is a inner drive that force someone to do activities.
It has been scientifically proved that motivation plays a very determinant factor in supporting the learners’ success in learning language or learning other subjects including learning subjects delivered in English. It is deniable that motivation will cause learners success or failed. When they have a high degree of motivation, they will be very probably successful. However, if they have a low level of motivation, they will gain the opposite result.
The classification of motivation in the field of second language acquisition to date is strongly influenced by the works of Gardner’s research and his associates (Brown, 2001). In the field of language learning motivation is sometimes differentiated from orientation. Orientation refers to the class of reasons for learning a language and motivation refers to a combination of the learner’s attitude, desires, and willingness to expend efforts in order to learn the second language. Furthermore, Gadner classifies the orientation into integrative and instrumental orientation. The integrative orientation is characterized by willingness to be like the valued members of the language community. Referring to learner sides, the integrative orientation means that the learner is pursuing a second language for social and/ or cultural purposes. Likewise, instrumental orientation, the learner is studying a second language in order to further a career, an academic goal or getting a job or passing an examination.
Another issue related to motivation is the terms intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. If the integrative and instrumental orientation is a dichotomy and refers to context of learning, the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation designates a continuum of possibilities of intensity of feeling or drive ranging from deeply internal, self-generated rewards to strong, externally administered rewards from beyond oneself (Brown, 2001). Furthermore, he explains that although intrinsic motivation is not the only determiner of language success, giving learners the opportunities to “do” language for their own reasons of achieving competence and autonomy is a better chance of success than if teachers make them dependent upon external rewards for their motivation. So, developing intrinsic motivation for the learners is better than giving an external reward for motivation.
In the form of a classroom perspective, Dornyei (2001) conceptualizes a practical model of motivation. Dornyei divides motivation into three levels: language level, learner level, and learning situation level. The language level encompasses various components related to aspects of the second language motivation associated with integrativeness and instrumentality. The learner level involves individual characteristics that the learner brings to the learning process such as notable self-confidence and the learning situation level is associated with the situation specific motivation rooted within classroom setting: course-specific motivational components (related to the syllabus, the teaching material, the teaching method and the learning tasks; teacher-specific motivational components (concerning the motivational impact of the teacher’s personality, behavior, and teaching style/practice such as modeling, task presentation, and feed back); and group specific motivational components (related to the characteristics of the learner group such as norm and reward system and classroom group structure).
Procedures of motivating students in the classroom
The following part of the discussion is adopted and summarized from the practical idea from Dornyei (2001), who gives workable strategies to motivate the students in learning a second language and it can be applied to teach subjects or non English subjects as abliged by the system of SBI (International Standard Schools) as piloted by the Indonesian government.
Motivational strategies are techniques that promote the individual’s goal-related behavior. They refer to motivational influences that are conciously exerted to achieve some systematic and enduring positive effect (Dornyei, 2001). This technique is aimed at basicly developing the learners’ behavior toward learning English systematically, and hopelfully it will affect the learners’ attitude outside the classroom. Although it was fomerly used in L2 classroom, it is also applicable to be treated to the learners with some modification and adaptation to the situation. For instance, to the learners while learning subject matter in English.
Dornyei (2001) depicts the procedures of motivational strategies in figure 1.
The first stage of how implementing the motivational strategies is creating the basic motivational conditions. The teacher should demonstrate his/her enthusiasm or personal interest in the course material and hope very seriously that the students can achieve or understand the topic easily. Next is getting close relationship to the students by showing the teachers’ care of them. After getting close to them, the teacher should create a pleasant and supportive atmosphere in the classroom by establishing tolerance, accepting mistakes as part of learning and understanding the subjects through English, bringing in and encouraging humor sometimes, applying ice breaker at beginning of the class to make classroom especially conducive to promoting the group discussion. Do not forget always to observe the group discussion and never let any violations go unnoticed.
Figure 1 The component of motivational strategies in classroom context
The second phase of motivational strategies is by generating initial motivation. In this step the teacher can do motivational strategy by raising the learners’ intrinsic motivation such as making the first meeting with the subjects written in English as a positive experience and comprehensible manner. Another way of generating initial motivation is increasing the learners’s expectancy of success in particular tasks, in this case, the materials or passages of the subjects written in English are understandable. Making them sure that there are no serious obstacles to success in comprhending the texts although English is used as medium of instruction during the class time. When the learners have expectancy in grasping with the text written in English and although English is used in delivering the content, it is effective atmosphere to continue with further motivational strategy step.
The third stage of motivational strategy is how to maintain and protect motivation. If the all ingredients for generating a motivating classroom environment are in place and the learners approach to learning situation, it is the time to maintain and protect the phase (Dorneyi, 2001). The phase can be carried out by making learning more stimulating and enjoyable by breaking the monotony of classroom event such as varying learning tasks and occasionally do unexpected process positively. Another effort is helping diminish language learning anxiety in the learning environment like promoting cooperation rather than comparison and accepting mistakes as part of learning. Still another attempt of maintaining motivational strategy is building the learners’ confidence by teaching them various learning strategy to develop either language or subject content aspects. Increasing the students’ motivation by endorsing learner autonomy is an important step of this phase as the learners are not always together with the teacher all the time.
The last phase of the motivational strategy is encouraging positive self evaluation. The learners, as human beings, not only look forward but they often spend a great deal of looking back. Help them deal with their past in a way that will promote rather than hinder the future efforts (Dornyei, 2001). This can accomplished by promoting the students’ attribution (attribution refers to explanation offer about why they were successful or, more inportantly, why they failed in the past) by providing them with positive feedback such as giving regular feedback about the progress and which area they should concentrate on. Increasing the students’ satisfaction is a good alternative to raise their motivation, such as monitoring their accomplishment and take time to celebrate any victory and sometimes include task whhich are then displayed publicly in the wall of the classroom. The last of this phase is using grade in a motivating manner and reducing the demotivating impact. This can be done by making the assessment completely transparent, applying continuous assessment and relying on measurement tools appropriately, and encouraging accurate student self assessments.
The following topics are alternative practical teaching techniques which are based on some research findings and effective to improve the students’ reading comprehension. Because I assume that teaching subject matter written in English in SBI (International standard Schools) in junior and senior high schooll is semilar to the way to teach reading comprehension, the summarizing teachnique and text mapping can be used to help non English teachers to cope with the content delivered in English.
Summarizing as a Technique of Teaching Subject through English
Oshima and Hogue (1991) explain that a summary is similar to a paraphrase except that a summary is shorter. When you summarize, you compress a large amount of information into the fewest possible sentences. In order to this, you include only the main points and main supporting points, leaving out the details. Moreover, Hayes (1990) proposes three steps in summary writing. He says that in a summary writing the writer should (1) include only important information, leaving out details that are not necessary for summing up the reading text, (2) compress information by combining it, where possible, and (3) add information to achieve coherence.
Mural and Surber in Carnine (1990) admit that writing a summary on a passage is an excellent postreading activity for some reasons. First, summary can better help the students understand the organization of the text. Second, it provides the students with practice determining the main idea and critical concept in the selection. Third, it provides the students with needed practice in expressing writing. And the last, the effort to identify the critical content during the summarizing process can help students remember those ideas.
Some research findings show that summarizing is an effective technique to be used to teach reading comprhenesion or in this case, subject matters written in English, which are now used in International Standard Schools in Indonesia. Flood and lap (1990) state that summary writing in its various forms still seemed to be one of the best vihicles available for implementing a constructivist, process-oriented approach to teaching reading comprehension. Junaidi (1996) did a research with experimental design to university students. He found that the studetns who are taught summarizing technique tend to have better reading comprehension than those who are taught with non summarizing technique. Particularly the students who are taught with summarizing technique achieve better reading score in inferential comprehension. However, this finding does not have a positive effect to level of literal comprehension.
Some Suggested Procedure of Teaching Techniques
There are some procedures of teaching reading comprehension through summarizing technique. Carnine (1990) proposes six steps of teaching reading which can also be applied to subject written in English. They are: (1) the teacher tell the students a rule for writing main idea sentences, (2) the students read the passage, (3) the teacher asks the students to figure out a main idea sentence by naming the person and telling what the person did in all the sentences, (4) the teacher calls on a students to say the sentence (he can make correction if the sentence is wrong), (5) the teacher repeats the procedure with the remaining passages, and (3) the teacher has the students write the main idea sentence for each paragraph. The important point of this process is that the students will be aware of the main idea sentence describing the whole text.
Furthermore, Shinker and Sheinker in Junaidi (1996) describe the teaching procedure of applying summarizing technique. They suggest the following steps: (1) introduce the purpose of summarizing, situations in which summarizing would be helpful and a model of a summary, (2) explain the steps required in summarizing, a rationale for each step, (3) provide drill on steps of summarizing, (4) ask the students to write a summary of reading selection following the prescribed steps, (5) ask the class members to brainstorm through the steps, creating a group summary, and (6) ask the students to compare their summary to that generated by the group. In addition, they should also emphasize the significance of giving feedback in order that the students can make or improve necessary corrections of their summary.
Finally, Junaidi (1996) proposes the procedure of summarizing technique for reading comprehension. He divided the procedures into three steps. They are pre-reading activity, whilst reading activities and post-reading activity. In the pre-reading activity, (1) the teacher should activate the students background knowledge and (2) predict possible information found in the text. In whilst reading activity, the teacher should (3) read the text once or twice either aloud or silently, (4) identify the general topic of the text, (5) identify the pattern of the text development, (6) discuss the difficult words, (7) identify the main idea of each paragraph, (8) classify the details of each paragraph into important details, (9) draw the outlines of the text based on the main idea and the important detail, and (10) ask the students to write a summary based in the outline. And in the post reading activities the teacher should review the text content and answer the comprehension questions. This procedure is a relatively complete step applied in teaching reading or subject matter written in English.
Text Mapping as a Technique of Teaching Subject through English
Schunk (1990) confirms that the mapping technique is an organizational tactic that improves learner’s awareness of text structure because mapping involves identifying important ideas and specifying their interrelationship. In this case the concept or ideas are identified, categorized, and related to one another. Moreover, he states that a map is conceptually akin to a propositional network because mapping involves creating hierarchy in which main idea or superordinate concepts are listed at the top, followed by supporting points, examples, and subordinate concepts.
Armbruster in Miller (1990) says that text mapping is an analogous operation where teacher selects key content ideas and represents them in a visual display, making explicit the idea relationship. Another definition is given by Carrell (1988); she states that text mapping involves selecting the key content from an expository passage and representing it in some sort of visual display (boxes, circles, connecting lines, tree diagrams, etc.) in which the relationships among the key ideas are made explicit. Furthermore, Carnine (1990) states that concept maps, also referred to as graphic organizers, graphic representation, structure overviews, allow the teacher to preteach concepts stressing their relationship so that they can facilitate initial attainment of the concepts and subsequent retention and retrieval of information.
There are some researches related to the effectiveness of text mapping as a technique in teaching reading comprehension. Geva in Carrel (1985) trained the less skilled students in text-mapping strategy to help them understand and remember text information. He concluded that the training seems to support the idea that learning to recognize text structure through flowchart transferred to more careful reading of expository text.
The advantages of mapping have been confirmed by Leo (1994), who states that mapping can be a very effective study technique, especially for students who prefer diagrams, charts, and pictures to large number of words. Beside it is very useful for anyone trying to understand both the organization of a reading text and the main ideas of that text. Furthermore, Adam and Brody (1995) say that mapping is a convinient way to all notes for entire chapter or a long section of a chapter into one or two pages. There are major two advantages: (1) it forces the reader to find the main adea and supporting detail, and (2) it provides an easy–to-understand set of notes for review. In addition, in comprehending a long text or a content of a book , mapping is also helpful to the a reader because the reader cannot do mapping until after he has actually surveyed the text or even a chapter and noticed its organization of the content and then he has to read the text or the chapter well enough to be able to condense all the information in a one-or-two page “map” . Another finding of the effectiveness of text mapping in improving students’ skill reading economic texts is shown by (Zuhairi, 2003). He concluded that text mapping is a good technique to helps both high and low skilled students comprehend economic texts. Reviewing the previous research findings of the effectiveness of text mapping in improving the students reading skill, it is advisable that the technique be applied in teaching subjects written in English and delivered in English as well.
Procedure of Text Mapping Technique
There are various procedures to follow if the teachers want to apply mapping technique in practical steps.
Leo (1994) states that the exact appearance of the map is unimportant and he gives a general guideline if a teacher will apply it in a process of teaching reading. The steps are as follows: (1) write the topic somewhere near the middle of the paper and surround it with a circle, rectangle, or other shape, (2) add important information with lines connected to the central topic, (3) connect related ideas with dotted lines; and (4) detect whether the text shows a description, a hierarchy, a comparison and contrast, or a cause and effect of information. See the appendix 1 to 3
Another of delivering a text mapping technique in teaching subjects matter is from Carnine (1990), who suggests some steps in constructing concept maps as follows: (1) determine the critical content (vocabulary, concepts, ideas, generalizations, events, details, facts, etc.) that you wish to pre-teach to your students, (2) organize the concepts in a visual representation that reflects the structure of the content: hierarchy, diagram, compare-contrast, timeline, or process/cycle, (3) design a completed concept map, (4) create a partially completed concept map, and (5) create a blank concept map.
In addition to constructing the concept map, the procedures of introducing or teaching through the concept maps will vary considerably, depending on the structure of the map. In general, Canrnine (1990) proposes the following steps. They are: (1) distribute partially completed concept maps to your students, (2) place a transparency of the completed map on an overhead projector, (3) introduce the information on the concept map, proceeding in a logical order, stressing the relationships between the vocabulary concepts, events, details, facts, etc, (4) review and firm up concepts you have introduced and (5) at the end of the lesson, review the critical content again, using the blank concept map. More detailed teaching procedure is proposed by (Zuhairi, 2005), who classifies the teaching procedure into three steps. They are pre-reading activities, whilst reading activities and post reading activities. In pre-reading activities, it begins with a teacher activitating the students’ background knowledge by (1) asking some general questions to relate the topics with what they have known in their mind and (2) ask the students to predict possible information found in the text. In Whilst Reading Activitie, the teacher (3) reads the text once or twice or ask the students to read silently or aloud, (4) train the students to identify the general topic of the text, (5) discuss the difficult words in context with the students, (6) provide a blank concept map of the text on Overhead Projector, on the board or in LCD projector, (7) ask the students to fulfill the blank map with the mean idea of each paragraph, and the key words or phrases as the supporting detail of paragraph, (8) review the critical content using the filled map. It is crucial to note that the teacher can also train the students on how to make a map based on various texts or let the students create their own map in indiviudally or in a group. Finally, during the Post-reading Activities, the teacher can review the text content or invite the students to review orally the general idea of the text and discuss the answer of the comprehension questions as feedback.
Concluding Reamarks
This paper is a kind of alternative to help the non English teachers who have to teach subject matters in English and to use English as a medium of instruction. It begins with the application of motivational strategies, which will make the students enjoy and lessen their anxiety for the class activities, and will possibly put the students in a conducive atmosphere to learn the subject matter. This will be very useful if the teacher can apply the motivational strategies continuously with some adaptations in accordance with the students’ need and classroom situation.
The next steps is summarizing and text mapping techniques of teaching subject matters which are relatively like teaching reading comprehension in English class. These proposed techniques have at least two advantages. They are an alternative choice for the non-English teachers who have to teach subject matters written in English and deliver them in English as medium of instruction. And finally these two teachniques can used as an optional ideas for the teachers to do a classroom action research.
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*) This paper is presented in Eight International Conference “ Internationalisation in Education: Implication for ELT in Indonesia” ITB Bandung Indonesia 20th– 22nd 2010
