The pitiful state of foreign language education

An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Danu, a graduate who majored in Japanese Literature in a public college in Padang, recently appalled me when he told me that the the highest achievement he ever attained in Japanese language is a decent pass in level 3-JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test).

I was even more surprised when I asked Danu if his kanji-reading ability has always been his weakness, and if he is much stronger in speaking the language instead. He said yes. I inquired no further as I fear it might hurt him somehow to see the surprise in my face having discovered his poor grasp of Japanese.

This should come as a shocking alarm to those who aren’t appalled as I am: passing a level 3-JLPT means that he could only read merely 300 kanji, which is just 15% of the ±2000 kanji necessary for a “literate” life in Japan.

Not that I am not going to make my own definition of “literacy” here. Being “literate” most of the time means that one can read the ABCs (some bigwig professors have extended the definition of “literacy” as the ability to say in words who or what you are, but this is not the main issue here), but being literate in a Chinese character-based countries like China or Japan may mean a different thing.

It is known that the ability to read 500 kanji is sufficient for one to read a Japanese newspaper. However, the fact that someone who studied Japanese Literature for four years in college could barely read anything in a Japanese novel should come as a blow - and a wake-up call - for most language educators in the country.

To my knowledge, majoring Japanese Literature in Japanese and American universities gives students the ability to produce essays that discuss the historical and contemporary Japan, to provide literary comments on haikus of well-known poets, or even discourse at length with Japanese native-speakers, all written and spoken in Japanese, of course.

Another example is Tuti (not her real name too), an English Literature graduate from a public college in Jakarta. When I first met her, I greeted her in Indonesian. Then I tried to converse decently with her in English, yet she could barely manage to speak the language fluently, with a lot of stutters here and there. I first thought that she is the kind of person who stutters a lot. When I switched back to Indonesian, all her stutters suddenly disappear, making me wonder how on earth she could have managed to write her thesis in English and defend her arguments there.

It is an irony that in British curriculum-based secondary schools in Jakarta, children of affluent Indonesians and expatriates alike know very well that taking the subject of English literature means that they would discuss poems and Shakespearean plays in detailed depth as far as they could manage to handle, akin to my own experience in studying English Literature subject in a Singapore secondary school. Due to the tough nature of the subject, many non-English native speakers often find it hard to cope with, and choose to drop the subject instead. I myself could only manage a decent pass in my Literature ‘O’ level.

Of course, picking examples of public college graduates and comparing them to the international standards does not mean that I am picking up the “bad fruits” as examples to disdain. A bigger and more comprehensive survey that encompasses all levels of education, be it international, private or public, could always be conducted by scientific think tanks anyway. Instead, such public colleges that one has never heard of are the truest examples of where the average-income Indonesian normally matriculates; hence they give a better measure of what kind of standard is accepted for an average Indonesian university student to graduate.

Taking a look at the top-notch educational institutions such as the Pelita Harapan University or Bina Nusantara University would only give us the wrong depiction of what the Indonesian higher education looks like, because such examples have already applied a more extensively international standard in their qualifications. Taking a look at the traditionally Indonesian-based top universities too, such as the University of Gajah Mada in Yogyakarta, Petra University in Surabaya or University of Indonesia in Jakarta could generate a similarly fallacious impression, since only the best minority of Indonesian students could manage to enrol there.

All in all, comparing the language studies across differing spectra could turn some of us sceptical in viewing the future of language education in Indonesia. There is undeniably a need for a better standardisation of language education, starting not just from high schools, but from the very early grades of primary school. A lot of secondary schools - public and private schools alike - in big cities across Jakarta have already started to pick new foreign language subjects like Mandarin, Arabic, or German, only to find the graduates being able to converse no further than introducing themselves.

If even most high school graduates today are unable to converse eloquently in English, which is the main second language in Indonesia, how on earth could the school have high expectations for their students to master a third or even a fourth one?

A friend of mine, a high-school student who is currently studying in one of the main Japanese language course centres in Jakarta, once joked that he himself is the most multilingual person he has ever known: apart from learning Japanese which is a subject unavailable at his school, he is compelled to take five other languages in school, that is to say Indonesian, English, Arabic, Mandarin, and French! I do not question his ability to comprehend English, as proven by his devouring of the latest English language edition of Harry Potter soon after it was sold in the book stores, but I have yet to know his current grasp of the other four foreign languages he is currently learning.

The fact remains that having a trilingual education is perfectly okay (that is, if the pupil can manage to learn two new languages at once), but tetralingual is not. Scientific researches have shown that it is highly unrecommended for humans to study more than two foreign languages at once, as the meanings of different lexicons and grammatical structures could jumble up in the Broca’s area, the part of brain responsible for the articulation of speech and the producing of language, especially if the languages he/she is learning are closely related to each other or belong to the same language family (such as studying the Romance languages of Italian and Spanish simultaneously).

There are four aspects of a language, namely Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing. The first two aspects determine the ability to comprehend a particular text/audiovisual message, while the latter two determine the ability to produce them. From the way I see it, language education in Indonesian schools and universities tends to focus language-teaching methods on the first two aspects, while the latter two are mostly left uncared for.

It is of no wonder then, that nowadays language course centres in big cities tend to be laris bak kacang goreng (sell as well as roasted peanuts), as the real demand to see their children to be able to grasp the four aspects of the language has finally come to the attention of students and parents alike.

Ironically, this linguistic problem is not found merely in a developing country like Indonesia. In Japan and South Korea, two of the most economically and technologically advanced countries in the world, there is a similar demand for language course centres, and the only difference from the Indonesian ones is that almost all of them focus in teaching solely English.

In both Indonesia and the two East Asian countries, we can trace back the root of the students’ lack of mastery in the four language aspects in their educators themselves. If not even the teachers are qualified enough to teach them all the basic principles of the language, how can we thus expect the students to master it well? It is a well known fact that most Japanese teachers of English language often stumble when they converse in the very same language they are teaching, a similar case I found in Tuti.

In Indonesia, there would be no problem at all in finding such course centres for those who live in the big cities, but what about those in the rural areas? They would be hard-pressed to find any, and even if there does exist such a centre, most parents there would not prefer to enrol their kids there due to the high expense they bring. Being able to enrol their kids in the public schools which cost next-to-nothing is already an attainment they are gratitude for, let alone affording additional expenses.

It should also come to our attention that in this era of globalisation, our neighbours like Malaysia and Philippines have taken an earlier step in increasing the quality of English-teaching education in their schools. English language has become the main language in both urban and rural areas alike, and this is indeed a thing that is apparently nonexistent in Indonesia. The Indonesian government - particularly the Ministry of Education - has not taken any similar measures to ensure that Indonesia’s young generation today are well-equipped with foreign-language skills, apart from their own Indonesian language.

To ensure that there is a holistic and wholesome approach to the increase in quality of language-teaching across the country, the Ministry of Education needs to ensure that most - if not all - language teachers across Indonesia, regardless of whether they are to teach in international schools, private schools or public schools in the big cities or rural areas alike, should be given a chance to dive deeper into the language by learning them first-hand by either inviting native speakers into the country or sending those teachers-to-be abroad. Scholarships should be made available for those who cannot afford them, and only then can we see the standard of linguistic abilities in public educational institutions being put at on equal par with the more reputable ones.
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Toshihiko Atsuyama is a teenage blogger who currently lives in Tangerang. He graduated from a Singapore secondary school with an 'O'-level degree in 2006, and is now seeking to pursue his higher education in Washington state, USA in June 2008. His blog can be found here.