Indonesian Language a Casualty of Poor Teaching, Parents’ Preference for English

Jakarta Globe, Putri Prameshwari, May 03, 2010

Education experts feel that students are no longer proud of the Indonesian language and that too much emphasis is placed on learning foreign languages. (JG Photo/Yudhi Sukma Wijaya)

Two-year-old Alvaro Zafransyah is Indonesian, with both his parents born and raised here, but at his home in Jakarta he is encouraged to speak English exclusively.

Milla Narendra, Alvaro’s mother, said that she had been teaching her son English ever since he was a baby.

“English is the second mother language these days,” she said. “I want my son to get used to it as early as possible.”

Many other parents are taking the same approach as Milla nowadays — teaching their children English, and even Mandarin, from an early age. Their aim is to make it easier for their kids to flourish in an era when both languages are deemed to be of vital importance.

However, the trend of studying a second language may be having an unintended side-effect. Next week, 80,000 of the 154,000 senior high school students who failed the recent national examinations exams are set to repeat their Indonesian language tests.

Education Minister Muhammad Nuh said he was surprised to see how many students flunked their Indonesian language paper.

“Indonesian language and biology were the two subjects that most students failed,” he said.

Ibnu Wahyudi, a lecturer at the University of Indonesia’s Faculty of Cultural Studies, said the desire to speak English dated back to the 1990s, when the country began opening up to multinational companies and foreign investors.

The trend picked up steam after the fall of Suharto, when previously-banned books and movies in English began appearing in the country. The Internet era began at the same time.

But Ibnu is of the opinion that there is “something wrong with the way parents force their children to speak English.”

He said that even though it was good for children to be able to speak English, parents must know when to start teaching them the language. “As Indonesians, why not teach them how to speak their own language first?”

“This is a case of inferiority,” Ibnu added, adding that people tended to feel more sophisticated and accepted in society when they spoke English.

Satria Dharma, chairman of the Teachers Club, an independent association, said the amount of English that parents used in daily conversation with their children made the language more attractive to learn than Indonesian. He added, however, that schools needed to strike a balance.

“It’s not a problem if parents want to use English intensively with their children,” Satria said, “but sadly, it is not balanced by good Indonesian classes in school.”

Both Ibnu and Satria said the government must address this issue.

Satria said the national tongue was one of the weakest subjects taught in school. “Indonesian language lessons are currently not interesting enough for children,” he said.

In schools, he said, the curriculum concentrated more on basic theories of Indonesian language rather than how it could be practiced every day. Ibnu added that another problem was the lack of suitable reading material printed in Indonesian.

“They read English books, watch English movies and even update their Facebook status in English, even though it’s all grammatically incorrect,” he said, adding that children seemed to think that it was better to write in broken English than in perfect Indonesian.

Ibnu said that the government must immediately try to rekindle students’ interest in the Indonesian language even though the era of globalization was forcing them to learn English.

“[The government’s] homework is how to make Indonesian children proud of their own language,” he said, “even if it takes a whole new generation to do so.”

Mansyur Ramli, head of the Education Ministry’s research and development division, said that now the exam results were out, the ministry could start assessing which subjects should be evaluated and improved next year.

“Indonesian language is certainly one of the subjects we will look deeper into,” he said.

Satria added that the government must review the curriculum and see if the Indonesian language taught in classes met the students needs or not.

For Milla, however, English remains a must for her son.

“You can do virtually nothing [in life] if you can’t speak English,” she said.