Being Human

Talking about English Day in my period, I want to make confession that I was not a good speaker during the English Day. I rarely used English when I talked with my friends and my seniors, because I thought it was not so necessary to do, and I saw my other friends and seniors just did the same as I was.

I wasn’t brave enough to start speaking in English. I just spoke when anybody started speaking in English. I felt my English was not good enough, even though I knew some words in English, but I still felt too shy to start speaking in English.

I think now it was a bad habit. So I think we have to improve this condition, so it will never be happened again in next time. I start to find some fact about situation of English Day in our school nowadays. One say it’s just the same when last time I was there. There’s nothing new about English Day execution in our school. What a surprise. Next year, we will have an international school, but the condition of English usage in our school is still poor.

I think we can learn from Gontor, which is a modern pesantren with a good teaching of English and Arabic as their foreign languages. There, you can find that English are not just taught by the teachers, but also applied in their daily activities as a skill. So at the end of education, the graduates can master English as a skill, not just knowing the right grammar and vocabularies, but also can use it to write and to talk. They can also give a speech in English, as well as in Bahasa Indonesia and Arabic.

To be able to master English, I think we have to be consistently speaking and practising English in English Day. No one is allowed to speak in other languages during English Day. Teachers have to push students to talk in English and nobody is allowed to laugh at someone else’s mistake. Learning from Gontor, they also using English alldays during the English Day. So they are not just using English in dining room, but also in their daily activities from 0 - 24. They even have to dream in English

Maybe it’s not so easy. One has to see the English ability of each student and to improve them properly. One also has to control the English usage during the English Day. If there’s no control, I think whatever a good plan will be nothing.

Well, I think we are now so far from our school. But I think we can still give our contribution by giving some guidance to the students and the teachers to be brave enough to start talking in English. Anyone who wants to join please come to Panduan Berbahasa Inggris, and give your contribution by adding or editing some new tips or expressions.

So, anyone else who also want to make confession?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.