Let's Speak Indonesian Volume 2: Ayo Berbahasa Indonesia

Introduction

Introduction Let’s Speak Indonesian: Ayo Berbahasa Indonesia is an introductory text that guides the learner from the novice to the intermediate-high level of Indonesian oral proficiency skills using the communicative approach. The communicative pedagogical framework results in a text that is designed for in-class use, not for individual (self) study. Each lesson teaches several language functions or speech acts, thereby enabling the student to communicate in a variety of social contexts. While teaching oral communication, the text also addresses the three modes of communication, i.e., the interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational, promoted by the Standards movement. Students listen and interpret the dialogues presented at the beginning of each lesson, engage in interpersonal communication via role-play exercises and group work, and finally make presentations based on group discussions. Classroom Interaction The text is written to create a student-focused classroom where students play an active and central role in classroom interactions, while the teacher is the facilitator and consultant. Most class time is devoted to pair or group work with students interacting primarily with each other. Second-language acquisition research has shown that students learn best when they are actively engaged in “real” communication and when they are at ease with their conversational partners. Thus, the two benefits derived from the student-centered classroom are that the students have more time to actively participate, and they are more relaxed, speaking with peers rather than with the teacher. The materials are rich with illustrations, diagrams, and photographs in order to bring Indonesian culture to the student and to diminish the need for translation during the process of language acquisition. In the early lessons, cognates from English are occasionally used instead of more commonly used Indonesian terms in order to avoid translation. The objective here is to give the beginning language learner confidence in his/her ability to understand Indonesian without the aid of an English translation and to develop his/her learning strategies for tolerating ambiguity and guessing from context. The practice of using English loan words in the early lessons rapidly decreases as the learner gains control of more Indonesian vocabulary. To aid the transition to Indonesian in the classroom, the student instructional language for the exercises is given in English for the first four units; it then shifts to Indonesian once the students are comfortable with the format and types of exercises used in the text. Finally, the text is designed for Indonesian to be the medium of instruction in the classroom. In order to maximize the time spent by students in meaningful communicative tasks, students come to class prepared, having read the lesson xiii objectives and the cultural notes. Since the primary objective of this text is to teach oral proficiency, not grammatical accuracy; the teacher should not be overly concerned about student “mistakes.” With sufficient comprehensible input and practice, students will acquire the correct language patterns. Instructors are encouraged to use other teaching materials that are specifically designed to develop grammatical accuracy. The Teacher’s Role Despite the student-centered management strategy, the teacher’s role remains crucial; at the beginning of a lesson, the teacher introduces the lesson and guides the students through any preparation needed for the lesson’s objectives . Then, while the students are engaged in small-group work, the teacher circulates around the class to keep the students on task, offering help to those who need it, observing common problems, and assessing learning progress. At the end of the group work, the teacher will often bring the class back together for group reports, a class check on the lesson’s objectives, a description of homework assignments, or plans for the next day. Small-group reporting from the ayo berkomunikasi exercises is especially useful and interesting to the whole class because students are inherently interested in the meaningful exchanges of their peers. Since some of the ayo berkomunikasi tasks entail homework, such lessons can not be completed until the next class session. Prior to the lesson, students should familiarize themselves with the lesson objectives by reading the English-language segments of the lesson and listening to the dialogue. The Organizing Principle of the Text This book consists of fifteen thematic (topical) units that address the speaking (functional) needs of the novice to intermediate learner and the interests of university students. Research studies have demonstrated that using functional topics rather than grammatical structures as the organizing principle yields far better results when one is learning oral proficiency skills. The fifteen thematic units...