My TEFL Perception and Endless Homework as an English Teacher

Teaching English requires an effort possessing protuberant input leading the students’ performance of using English as language focused on the intensity of usage convenient with the primary function of language. Talking about teaching English, it ultimately always leads the teachers to examine and implement a reasonable method or technique so that the prior devised project compressed into integral targets inserted in the curriculum pointed to the learning materials can probably be achieved successfully as expected. In addition, to cope with this situation, some teachers decide to implement teaching techniques such as some of them “Task Based Learning (TBL)” admitted to provide bigger spaces for students to interact, and even the contrary one, “Form Focused Instruction (FFI)” leading students to firstly investigate the English rules other than other elements. Either TBL or FFI currently keeps becoming the two having contrary ideas of usefulness debated by some experts.

TBL, Task Based Learning, in a more generalized concept, means a teaching technique which relies on communicative competences as the focus. In the implementation, the teacher will decrease his role to be engaged in the class owning to the principal thought that implies the situation in which the students have to possess a big opportunity to interact in the class. The teacher just facilitates them with giving some accurate and measured instructions, and the rest he would just watch, observe, and evaluate the students’ involvement in those led by the teacher. The teacher here will generally manage the learning activities into three constituent parts including pre-teaching, cycle-teaching, and language focus. Especially in cycle-teaching, the teacher organizes the class with also noticeable frameworks consisting of individual work, pair work and group work. In addition, for language focus, the teacher serves students with an inductive way usually reinforced by a drilling strategy as the feedback. TBL is believed to capably trigger students to be motivated to keep using English even when being out of the classroom.

FFI, Form Focused Instruction, on the other hand, depicts a different thought from TBL in that it even focuses straightly to make students engaged in a deductive framework of learning. FFI, in the implementation, leads students to commence the English learning process with understanding the rules first since it is comprehended that rules will control the meaning of language conveyance. Lots of ideas suggest that even if the teaching is connected to the basis of language acquisition rule, such as when a young child acquires a language, he would start by comprehending the rule of producing one word, two words, and etc. Conclusively, FFI holds a positive point here. In the implementation, the teacher presents some examples of language usages, gives students chances to imitate and comprehend, and gives students tasks to interact more as the previously brought cases in the class. This technique is also believed to capably cover the strength of Asian students while learning English since Asian students are not so closed to western culture of learning and using English.

Virtually, if both cases concerning with TBL and FFI are asked to me to take part to respod which one I am interested to implement without having to combine them at once, I had better make up my mind to agree with TBL since the first priority of an English teacher is to introduce students with an authentic language use as communication tools. TBL has this point because TBL serves a possible learning situation where students will use their prior English ability to interact freely in the class as time and instructions are given by the teacher. Notwithstanding, some researches have proven that TBL is not suitable for Asian students including Indonesian students just because of the English teachers are difficult to organize the tasks in TBL and even to trigger students’ eagerness to try a new paradigm of language learning, I believe that this phenomenon is not caused by the existence of TBL itself, but by the teachers themselves who actually should commence to dig their comprehension about managing and implementing TBL. In my opinion, this one is all English teachers’ homework in Indonesia including me.