The context of the teaching of English in Indonesia is indeed unique, leading to differences in the ease with which children have access to education. Those with great difficulty in accessing education have been and will be left behind by those without any or with little difficulty. Technology will certainly help in easing those in remote areas. The limited financial capacity, however, has made it impossible to have equity in educational access; the equity problem remains unsolved. Under such a complex environment, a more appropriate curriculum design should be sought. So far the same national standard has to be achieved by children. This paper explores possibilities of having a multi-standards English curriculum design aimed at providing every child to learn according to their abilities and rates of learning. A three-level standard curriculum is then proposed: the instrumental standard for highly advantaged children, the functional standard for those who are fairly advantaged, and the appreciative standard for those who are disadvantaged.

Teaching English in primary schools relates to the readiness of the schools and the students' proficiency levels. If the schools have the sufficiency of English teachers, media, and textbooks, they will be ready to teach English. It is because primary schools deal with young learners aged 6-12 years and this period is believed as the best moment to gain knowledge. It is in line with the basic principle stating that young learners can learn English better [11]. Teaching English in primary schools provides both benefits and challenges. The benefits are reported by Moon [16], Singleton [10], and Read [18], and the problems are pointed by Copland, et al. [9], Khamari et al. [8], and Wei-pei [7]. Regarding the issue, this article identifies the benefits and challenges based on theories and research findings and then proposes several solutions of the difficulties which can be the references for the schools to provide high-quality English teaching and learning.

No abstract

The fact that English teachers teaching in a computer science department may not really know detail about information technology (IT) as a subject, as well as its terminologies, brings about difficulties when deciding what kind of teaching materials are appropriate to the student’s learning needs. Another issue is that some computer science teachers do not have an English language teaching background. This can be a drawback for this group of teachers since they do not really know how to teach the language. The following discussion is a needs analysis used as a preliminary study to develop an in-service training (IST) model to improve English teachers’ pedagogical and professional competencies in a computer science department. Pedagogical knowledge, skill, and attitude, and professional competency became the core study since these two were the obvious difficulties faced by the two groups of teachers. This study involved English computer science teachers, the curriculum administrator, and the students in two private universities and one state university in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Observations, open interviews, and questionnaires were used to gather the data.

No abstract