Teaching English in Indonesia Working in the Emerald of the Equator

By Geoff Andrews

Despite continued teething problems as Indonesia moves to a democracy, it remains an extremely popular destination for both experienced and newly qualified English language teachers. Why? Could be something to do with an excellent climate, tasty cuisine and warm, friendly locals who have a genuine curiosity about foreigners.

English language teachers living and working in Indonesia have an excellent lifestyle. All reputable employers will offer shared housing with 3-4 other teachers. The teachers live in middle class neighborhoods and tend to have a maid for cooking, cleaning and washing clothes. It takes a little bit of adjustment to having a live-in maid – one has to remember it’s a cultural norm, it provides vital income to Indonesia’s rural community and despite the costs of paying a wage, having a maid makes it cheaper to buy groceries.

Bartering is the norm in Indonesia – a commodity is generally worth whatever the retailer can get for it. Of course supermarkets will have a “harga pas” (fixed price), but it means they are more expensive. As an Indonesian (and usually indigenous to that particular island), your maid will have excellent bartering skills – and more importantly she’ll also have the time to shop around.

When making your own purchases, a sense of humor and a little bit of Javanese (if on Java), can go along way to driving that price down. Anecdotally, I discovered there seemed to be 3 price brackets on Java – 1 for Javanese, 1 for “bule” (white people) and 1 for Chinese Indonesians. In colonial days the Dutch brought Chinese people over to help with administration, consequently many 4 th-5 th generation Chinese Indonesians hold a lot of economic power which causes some resentment.

Where Are the Jobs?

Pretty much everywhere, with a large concentration on Java – more than half of Indonesia’s 200 million people live on Java and it’s where all the decent Universities are. Getting a position on Bali is never easy and preference is usually given to people in country, especially those who have a proven track record teaching in Indonesia.

I spent 7 years on Java with EF English First, which is the largest chain of language schools in Indonesia and therefore the largest employer. They operate on all the major islands but have the most vacancies on Java and Sumatra. Being so large they have the advantage of career development, such as rising to the position of Director of Studies and beyond.

Visa Requirements

Indonesian’s Immigration Authority has tried to restrict the influx of “backpacker” teachers and has put some controls in place. To have correct working papers, teachers need to have a TEFL certificate. Although employers prefer a certificate that contains 6 hours teaching practice, this is not a requirement from the Indonesian Immigration Authority. A degree is not necessary.

Indonesian’s Immigration Authority will only issue teaching visas to nationals of the UK, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand – as it has deemed these to be English speaking countries. Employers in Indonesia are restricted by these laws and are by no means discriminating against nationals of other countries.

The schools should process candidates for a 12-month working visa and issue a KITAS (Identity Card for foreigners) after registration with the relevant authorities in the city you are working. Unless you live close to an Indonesian embassy, the initial visa is usually processed in Singapore on the way to Indonesia as most schools have agents there who can process the visa quickly.

The Students

English is part of the national curriculum in Indonesia so it is rare that you will have to teach complete beginners. Indonesian uses the Romanized alphabet so there are no difficulties with regards to teaching a new script.

The majority of the teaching takes place at the end of the students’ day – be that after school or after work. Most language schools operating in Indonesian have a high proportion of children and if applying to a school located in a residential area this could mean that up to 50% of a teacher’s workload could involve teaching children (i.e. under 16).

Compared to European teenagers, Indonesian teenagers are well behaved and a pleasure to teach. They tend to embrace English and are particularly interested in our popular culture. Some status is attached to being able to speak English and frequently Indonesian celebrities use a smattering of English to demonstrate how cultured they are when being interviewed by the Indonesian press. This has real advantages as an English language teacher – it’s “cool” to speak English!

Working Conditions

Wages and hours will vary from location to location and from provider to provider. Generally teachers teach about 24 hours a week. All reputable employers (except possibly on Bali) will pay for flights, accommodation and health insurance.

Geoff Andrews spent seven years as an English teacher and then an Academic Manager in Indonesia. He now works for Kumon Educational in their U.K. offices and frequently returns to Indonesia on business. See his TransitionsAbroad.com article on Living in Indonesia for more on life in Indonesia.

(this entry is taken from http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/work/esl/articles/teaching_english_in_indonesia.shtml)

difficulties in learning English for Indonesian

After a great deal of time spent teaching in Indonesia and talking to other teachers, it is clear that it is possible to identify a number of challenges specific to Indonesian language learners. While this brief article is clearly generalising about a huge, diverse nation, there do seem to be common difficulties, mostly resulting from interference from their first language and from the education system which they have been through. This article will highlight some of these challenges in the hope that awareness among both teachers and students benefit students studying English in the future.

First, the Indonesian education system (or at least the system which today's teenage and adult language learners passed through) tends to produce students with preconceived notions of ways to be taught. Often this means passive learners expecting to absorb information from the teacher, who is the center of a class, an authority figure, and someone who must not be questioned. Language learning is most effective in an environment where active students feel free to participate, get involved and ask questions; an environment where students know that making mistakes is the best way to learn, and where making a mistake does not result in loss of face.

While this article is not intended to criticise the education system in Indonesia, it does seem that the content of a great deal of Indonesian schools' English language curriculum is based on the teaching of theoretical knowledge as opposed to developing functional, communicative language skills. Often this means that the Indonesian ESL student is able to produce complex grammatic forms, but has little awareness of the actual meaning of the language they are producing. Upon prompting, A student would be able to write a correct sentence using, for instance, the present perfect continuous tense, but when questioned as to the real usage and the meaning of the grammatical form, many high school graduates are stumped.

Then there are the problems resulting from L1 (first language) interference. In terms of pronunciation, many Indonesians have trouble pronouncing consonant clusters (3 or more consonants together is a word), as these clusters do not occur in Bahasa Indonesia. The rolling of the letter 'r' is another common issue, but not one which causes any kind of strain for the listener. In general, pronunciation is not a huge problem for Indonesians, especially when compared to learners from Asian countries with tonal languages such as China and Vietnam.

Bahasa Indonesia does not have tenses as such, and a simplified method of talking about different points in time is often attempted in English (for example, 'yesterday I go'). The concept of tenses, especially the more complex perfect tenses, is often difficult to grasp for Indonesian students. Similarly, Indonesian English students often have trouble creating sentences with correct word order, again caused by the word order patterns in their first language (for example, 'the tree big'). Finally, most Indonesian words are spelled phonetically, creating problems with learning the inconsistent, almost random way in which many English words are spelled.

While the few problems mentioned above do create barriers for Indonesians, they are relatively easy to overcome. Good teachers with an awareness of these difficulties can adjust the way they teach and the materials they use to suit Indonesians. Courses can be created which have Indonesian students in mind, rather than generic courses designed for European learners. Again generalising, it can also be said that, given the right environment and encouragement, Indonesians soon become active, communicative students. Indonesians are hard working, dedicated, enthusiastic and, in general, a pleasure to teach.

One school which recognises the importance of tailoring language education to suit Indonesians is 'Aim for English' www.aimjakarta.com, a pioneering Jakarta-based language centre. Their incredible facilities, custom-designed courses and experienced teachers all combine to provide the very best language education for Indonesians.

In Indonesian:kursus bahasa Inggris di Jakarta
Belajar bahasa Inggris untuk bisnis, general, conversation, studi akademik, IELTS preparation and much more!

(this entry is taken from http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/106517/languages/common_english_language_problems_of_indonesian_students.html)

English is difficult

Even saying it in verse makes it no better.

English is notoriously a difficult language to learn because it is so horribly irregular in its spelling and pronunciation. Subjection to more than a thousand years of external influences — the forced imposition of French, shifts in pronunciation after spelling became fixed, the linguistic influence of the classical languages, and a huge importation of foreign words as a result of exploration and colonialism — has turned English into a mishmash.

A couple of poetic demonstrations of the fact have come my way, which seemed worth recording with some notes on their origin. The first is widely known today and appears in many English textbooks, under titles such as Why English is So Hard, but is always marked as by Anonymous when any attribution is given.

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese,
You may find a lone mouse or a whole nest of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But a bow if repeated is never called bine,
And the plural of vow is vows, never vine.

If I speak of a foot and you show me your feet,
And I give you a boot would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth, and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

If the singular’s this and the plural is these,
Should the plural of kiss ever be nicknamed keese?
Then one may be that and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.

We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren,
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim,

So the English, I think, you all will agree,
Is the queerest language you ever did see.

This goes back a lot further than you might possibly guess. A search in newspaper archives found that its first appearance in this form was in American newspapers and magazines at the end of the nineteenth century (the earliest I’ve found being in the Galveston Daily News of Iowa in 7 June 1896). Early examples also give no author, but attribute it to a magazine called The Commonwealth. It was widely reproduced in the following years and has remained popular ever since, though people have modified it from time to time to remove some of the less common or outdated words, such as kine. Whoever created it was building on earlier attempts, since variations on some of the verses are to be found in print much further back. In 1858, the Prescott Transcript of Wisconsin published various of its verses, attributed to publications such as The Comic Grammar, the Philadelphia Gazette and the Brooklyn Advertiser. Other papers later reproduced, consolidated and extended these squibs into a fuller form of which the 1896 version above is the culmination.

The other poem details the problems of pronunciation faced by those learning English as a second language. This is rather long (nearly 300 lines) and so I’ll give you an excerpt only:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).

Made has not the sound of bade,
Say — said, pay — paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.
Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.
From “desire”: desirable — admirable from “admire”,
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.

In this case, we know who wrote it. The poem was created by the Dutch writer and schoolteacher Gerard Nolst Trenité and first appeared, under the title of De Chaos, in his English textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent in 1920. He revised and enlarged it many times during his life (he died in 1946) and so there are many versions in existence. Like the other poem, those reproducing it have also felt free to amend it to suit their own needs.

Many versions end with a couplet that must pierce the heart of every confused and desperate student of the language:

Hiccough has the sound of sup.
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

(this entri is taken from http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/ar-eng1.htm)

the beginning

this is just the beginning of my blogspot. hopefully it will be useful for everybody...