Suchergebnisse

The integration of international quality assurance standards into Indonesian higher education curricula, together with the enactment of the New Standard of Higher Education (NSHE), are creating new and significant pressures on the curriculum renewal as well as the reconstruction of course syllabus design in foreign language departments in Indonesian universities. Just like any other units (courses) in foreign language departments in Indonesia, Academic Writing course at English Language Teacher Education (ELTE) is impacted by the new government policies. Latest research suggest that both curriculum renewal and syllabus development project are integral part of the quality assurance system where it focuses on the transparency and accountability in curriculum design and delivery. The key elements of the course syllabus that are made transparent and accountable, for instance, gives hints at the shifting knowledge structures, the use of new technologies, the emphasis on the development of students' skills, and the extended responsibility being placed on students for their own learning development. This paper reports how these key elements are inserted into a learner-centred pedagogy of academic writing at ELTE department in Indonesia in order to meet the requirements of the 21st century learning that are individual, personalized, adaptive, modular, integrated, and non-sequential. The establishment of computer-assisted language learning environment combined with the new pedagogy of academic writing, in essence, opposes the existing traditional approaches to language learning and literacy pedagogy in Indonesia. The entire story presented in this paper is a significant excerpt from the preliminary phase of experiment of a PhD research project conducted in Indonesia. The insights presented in this paper should trigger a holistic reform in language teacher education in Indonesia.

Abstract: This study was primarily intended to capture the English as foreign language learners' (henceforth EFL learners) experience in making sense of the text: to what extent the meaning-making elements of the texts are comprehended and interpreted by EFL learners as readers. The investigation itself was centered around the notion of metafunctions – ideational, interpersonal, and textual – of the text for several reasons. This study tries to reveal how EFL learners make sense of the two selected articles taken from "The Jakarta Post" entitled "Australia Stops Some Cattle Exports to Indonesia" and "Australia's ban on Cattle Exports to RI Political". The two articles were downloaded from thejakartapost.com in June 2011. The main reason why newspaper articles were chosen was because, as Lehtonen (20006) puts it, "newspaper descriptions of reality are always produced from a certain perspective". In the context of this study, the two groups of respondents were involved: two respondents who have not taken Functional Grammar class (group one) and two respondents who have attended functional grammar class (group two). The four respondents are English Department students at one private university in Kuningan, West Java. The study shows that reading is not simply a matter of recognizing the alphabetical orders of the texts. Reading is, in fact, a discursive activity which is influenced by the previous textual experiences. The quality of interpretation is always affected by the background knowledge of readers, the ability in recognizing the features of the texts, and, of course, the ability to identify the metafunctions of the texts. An interaction with a discourse will automatically generate a new discourse. The reading of particular texts will in turn trigger the reading (and the discussion and analysis) of the other texts. Key words: metafunctions, meaning making, metacognitive system, subculture