Indonesian High Schools vs
CBC Standards: A Dream or Reality?
Hendra
Tedjasukmana
The
new curriculum, Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), has been a hot discussion
among schools and teachers. To many high schools and teachers it might be a
confusion and burden to implement it in the English subject, considering the teachers’
competence, school facilities, learning activities and the students’ competence
and habit. CBS is a set of standardized educational programs leading the
learners to be competent in various life skills in which each consists of a set
of competence and then learning outcomes (Diptoadi,
2003). Competence, according to Webster’s dictionary, means “the quality of
being competent; possession of required skills, knowledge, qualification and
capacity”. These two definitions lead all English practitioners to the idea
that CBC must equip learners with communicative tools so that they ‘survive’ in
their life especially in the coming global life. To increase the learners’
communicative competence they are to be given more ability to enhance the
functional potential of their English language (Stubbs, 1986: 30). However, it
does not mean that the structural aspect of the language is ignored in the
communicative language teaching (Littlewood, 1981:
1). The communicative competence involves, among others, discourse competence
and socio-linguistic competence.
The
underlying insights of CBC is then making up standards that English
practitioners must or are expected to fulfill the requirements of being
skillful and creative and the schools must or are expected to provide a center
where teachers as well as learners can get easy access to the world outside and
to facilitate them to use the language to their own learning pace. Teachers and
learners are supposed to be active in the learning process, even involving
themselves in the community where English is possible spoken. This surely
indicates that teachers and learners must me ready to work hard. Teachers cannot
teach many classes while they are not ‘forced’ to do so; they must possess good
English communicative competence while many of them might in fact be less
competent; they have to spend much time thinking of and preparing creative and
various activities for the learners while they have only less time or ‘fossilized’.
In the part of learners, many of them are not accustomed to activating
themselves in learning the language; they do not have counterparts to use the
language outside the school, and they might have low competence in the language
so that they have to work extra hard to catch up and this might bring them to
frustration.
All
in all, CBC requires high standards for teachers, schools and learners and it
is doubted that CBC can be well implemented in high school if the conditions
remain the same.
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Tedjasukmana, H. (2003,
October). Indonesian high schools vs CBC
standards: A dream or reality. Paper presented at the 51st
TEFLIN International Conference,
Website: www.geocities.com/eltindonesia
Email: eltindonesia@yahoo.com