What Teacher Educators Should Know: A Perspective to
Train Teachers of Young Learners
Helena I. R. Agustien
This paper aims at sharing some
ideas regarding curriculum changes that have taken place at the State
University of Semarang [Universitas
Negeri Semarang/Unnes] due
to the fact that our future graduates will face new challenges in that many of
them will teach young learners starting from, at least, year four of primary
schools. The changes are made based on some theoretical assumptions regarding how
children learn language and research findings showing that English for primary
schools in Central Java is mainly geared at
the learning of English vocabulary. In order to produce graduates who are
competent in handling young learner classes, our institution introduces courses
that provide new perspectives and skills that so far have tended to be taken
for granted. Considering that young learners are “expert learners” as far as
“picking up a new language” is concerned, a course called Introduction to Language
Acquisition is introduced. In order to “pick up” or to acquire a language,
young learners need to be exposed to the language and it is the teacher’s job
to create maximum exposure by conducting the lessons in English. However, some
studies show that many teachers do not use English as the medium of instruction
probably because they do not have the ability to do the scaffolding talk.
Therefore, Unnes includes a course called Speaking
for Instructional Purposes to train the students to use spoken language from
opening to closing the lessons. This kind of speaking ability is important
because the ultimate goal of language learning is communication, oral and
written. To develop communication ability, learners need to communicate all the
time during the lessons meaning that we need to make them orate and literate
persons. Thus, we need to put language learning within a literacy perspective.
For this reason, Unnes also put Literacy Education in
its curriculum so that teachers do not loose sights regarding what they are
supposed to develop during lessons. In this course we address issues such as
realistic literacy levels, methodological implications and the teachers’
required skills. Besides, English for Young Learners has also become one of our
new subjects. Elaborations of what each subject constitutes will be presented
in the full paper.
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Agustien, H. I. R. (2004, February). What
teacher educators should know: A perspective to train teachers of young learners.
Paper presented at the national conference on Teaching English to Young
Learners: Why and How, Bandung, Indonesia.
Website: www.geocities.com/eltindonesia
Email:
eltindonesia@yahoo.com