Competence-Based Approach (CBA)
Abdul Kadir Mubarak
Today’s current issue on curriculum development is
competence-based curriculum. Many teachers of secondary schools were sent to
attend in-service training on this new approach. Manuals were published to
guide teachers on how to implement this approach. At tertiary level, CBA should
also be adopted as university graduates are expected to be competent to do
their real-life tasks or to pursue their studies.
The key elements in the curriculum as generally proposed by the curriculum designers are objectives, contents, organization of contents, and evaluation. The latest curriculum model introduced by Stenhouse (1975) is process curriculum. In other words, the approach used in the curriculum design is a process approach, which basically considers the social, political, and educational context. The shift from product approach to process approach has made significant changes in language teaching program and in English language teaching in Indonesian universities in particular due to the changes in the social, political, and educational context. No curriculum is fixed. Any curriculum should be flexible to any change if the weaknesses are found after having been evaluated. The need in changing the objectives with competence-based ones is a proof that there are some weaknesses in the curriculum of ELTS providers throughout Indonesian universities.
CBA is taken into consideration to be an appropriate approach to specifying the
objectives of syllabus or curriculum of English language teaching (ELT) in
Indonesian universities although it is quite late as this approach has been
used long time a go in other countries such as the United States and Australia.
Since the emergence of this approach (1970) in the
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Mubarak, A. K. (2003, August). Competence-based
approach. Paper presented at the NUESP [Network of University ELT
Service Providers] National Conference,
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