My sample
might be staggeringly small – it is the fourth largest country in the world,
after all – but I feel sort of confident saying that at least many Indonesian
students of English learn the language with a fair amount of fear. My sample
includes the students I taught at Satya Wacana, the students I met at the
boarding school in Madura, and students who I met yesterday (who were the
majority of the participants in the workshop that was supposed to be for
teachers), and it’s informed by the teachers I’ve spoken to and worked with
across the time I’ve lived in Indonesia. Here’s how I learned it yesterday.
Because the
participants turned out to be mostly students preparing to teach English (the
person who planned it didn’t follow Umi’s directions: it was not a mistake on
her part, I feel compelled to note), I changed one of the questions I’ve used
as a writing prompt near the beginning of the workshop – instead of asking
about their successes and frustrations in their teaching of writing, I asked
them about their experiences writing in English, what they enjoyed and what was
challenging. When they read, there were some fairly consistent themes across
the group: they don’t write very much, and they don’t like to write much. They worry especially about their grammar,
but it’s not really an abstract worry, of course – what they are worried about
is having their teacher read what they wrote and simply point out every single
mistake students make in their writing.
One student said she prefers
speaking to writing, because when she speaks the teacher doesn’t correct every
single word. They worry about the vocabulary too – they expressed the sort of
contradictory but easily understandable sentiment that they liked writing
because it helped them learn new words, and that they didn’t like writing
because they often didn’t know the right words for things. But that’s wrapped
around the teacher too, because the wrong word will be corrected. One young
woman wrote about a promising assignment where all the students wrote blog
entries and shared them among the class, who then, it turned out, responded in
their comments by pointing out all the mistakes that they make, including the
teacher’s now very public corrections.
Writing, in other words, often
appeared to them as a kind of trap that they had no choice but to step into
again and again: think Charlie Brown kicking the football, but without even his
blind optimism to drive them. When they write, they already know, they will
make mistakes, for many of them almost certainly several in every line, and
their teacher will point out the mistakes, and the assessment of the writing
will be based on the amount of mistakes they make. And so they spend hours
crafting every sentence, writing it slowly, studying it carefully, making sure
that everything is just as it should be before they move onto the next
sentence. What they say is completely and totally unimportant, because their
teacher won’t notice it.
I need to be careful to keep this
from appearing as a slam on teachers. I don’t mean it that way. Teachers in
Indonesia work, often, in classrooms with 40 students, and they might have as
many as eight different classes in a given week. They have a
government-mandated curriculum that includes direct instruction in various text
types – expository, narrative, blah blah blah – and their students will be
tested on their knowledge of those texts. (They know, of course, that their
students’ performance on the national exams will assess the teachers as much as
the students.) They learn and say things like “Analytical texts have very
strict structures that students need to learn how to follow,” which is the way
text-types – modes, we used to call them in my field of composition studies -
always get explained, even when they claim not to be doing that (and it of
course a version of silliness that has no reflection in actual non-school
written discourse). And they are modeling a teaching strategy their own
teachers almost certainly used before them, at least when it comes to the
determined and vigilant correction of errors in writing. They know it’s not
working, really, the teachers I’ve met, but they don’t know why, and they don’t
have a framework, really, to think beyond what’s not working.
All of this should sound familiar
to American teachers too, especially those who have been teaching writing for a
while. The reading of texts simply to discover what’s wrong with them, the
focus on teaching certain kinds of structures and formal requirements, being
stuck in a style of teaching that’s not working because trying to imagine
another way is so difficult, especially given the demands of every day
classrooms and the dearth of meaningful professional development: these are
teachers’ problems in the United States, too, just as the fear of writing in
English is not limited only to students who are learning to write English as a
foreign language.
Today at Umi’s school I met with a
large group of senior high-schoolers, and one of the questions I got was “In
the United States do teachers put on a scary face when they go into the
classroom like they do here in Indonesia?” I got a giant laugh from the group
when I immediately put on a very angry face, but the question made me a little
bit sad, too. (A chicken just strolled by, getting its exercise I imagine so it
can remain super fit like most Indonesian chickens.) There is a way of being a
teacher here that silences students in many occasions – it drives Umi crazy,
and it also makes her life hard, because her students love her and she is a
teacher who refuses to lead with error correction – in fact from my perspective
she is a revolutionary teacher who is pushing boundaries in Indonesia, but as a
result she seems to be deeply unpopular with her colleagues. She actually
deserves her own blog entry soon, since she is so amazing.
I wish my academic discipline of
composition studies, with all its renewed attention to what we are presently
calling translingualism, could really embrace world of English writing
instruction. We’ve thought so much about it in the first year college classroom
and in some cases in other classrooms beyond the first year, but we’re missing
out on the real drama of global English, regarding its teaching, the ways
writing happens in those settings, and especially the way the mania for correctness
is shaping deeply how students understand and learn English outside of American
universities. Our students in our Universities are already in one of the most
privileged educational settings in the world, and while of course we should be
paying attention to them and working to implement current practices and
theories as best as we can, there are countless millions more students across
the globe who are caught in a chaotic imperial expansion of English, who are
learning English for reasons that no one is clear about, except that everyone
says that you must learn English.
Today, in another workshop, one of
the examples of student error that a teacher gave was “Today my cat passed
away, and my grandfather died.” It is an error, he said, because he should have
written that his grandfather passed away and his cat died. I kind of understand
what he is trying to say, but even then it is just silliness. It seemed as if
he spent a fair amount of time trying to teach this distinction to his student,
and he asked me what I thought about it. “Wow,” I said. “That kid had a really
awful day.”
I asked the
teachers in the workshop today how we should respond to some of the ideas they
generated in a first writing, that their students don’t like writing, that they
are scared of making mistakes, that they freak out about not knowing the right
vocabulary term. What should we do about this? I asked. Most agreed that we
should tell our students not to worry about making mistakes in their writing,
to just relax and write what comes to their mind. And what do you do with that
writing when you get it? How would you respond to it? Most of them said that
they would be nice about showing students how to correct the mistakes in their
writing. Maybe they thought about the conversation we had after that – about
how if we say mistakes don’t matter, and then all we do is fix their mistakes,
our students are several steps ahead of us already. They know that we aren’t
serious when we tell them not to worry about mistakes; they know that mistakes
are what their teachers will see, whether students are worried about them or
not when they write. They know that the only thing that matters about writing
is getting the right word or the right grammar, that they aim for perfection,
error-free writing, as the most important goal.
I always open the workshops speaking Indonesian, though, on purpose. I do my very best to say what I want to say, and I work hard at it, but I know that I am continually making mistakes, using the wrong word, and on and on. I come back to that later when we're discussing errors, asking them, were you paying attention mostly to all the mistakes I made when I spoke Indonesian? They say of course not (though they would never admit it if they were, in Java, since that would be so rude) - and I think it's true. They listen to me, and they stretch to understand my clumsy Indonesian, with a generous ear. That's the ear I wish teachers everywhere could hear their students with.
I can’t
pull this together in my own coherent stream just yet, except to say that
students of English writing are scared, that they know how regularly they make
mistakes in language because pointing that out seems to be one of the primary
goals of language instruction. So I’ll just post this now, and let the ideas
keep bouncing around.
On a side
note, I heard a great phrase at the workshop in Banyuwangi on Sunday. A older
teacher, who from the neck-up looked a bit like a wayang kulit – a Javanese shadow puppet – talked about taking his
students from Banyuwangi on the ferry across to Bali, where they sought out
tourists who they could interview for their English learning. He referred to it
as “hunting native speakers,” which is a phrase that has become a private joke
between Umi and me. My family and I have been hunted like that before, in Bali
and in Yogyakarta, by hordes of students who interviewed us about our age and
what we think about Indonesia. He also showed me pictures on his camera during
the break, in which google-eyed Javanese high school boys interviewed a 20
something women in a tiny bikini. You won’t find any bikinis on any Javanese
beaches, at least not the ones I have visited – I imagine the man behind the
camera was a bit google-eyed too, and the students were probably thinking, this
is a pretty cool assignment…
Banner count: six now - these banners no doubt will be well-recycled into tablecloths for street-side warungs. The two from the workshop today had a picture of me standing in some Montana snow-scape.
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