“I Prefer to Take an Intensive English Course”: A study on Indonesian Gap-year Students

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that senior high school graduates in Indonesia are expected to commence their studies shortly after graduation. However, this commonality does not apply to certain groups of students who are categorized as gap-year students. Some reasons such as economic factors, self-discovery, the dilemma on the future carrier are probably the considerations why senior high school graduates postpone to commence their studies to the universities for a while. Interestingly, scarce investigations are done to unveil pedagogical reasons behind this phenomenon. Anchored by this very fact, the present study attempts to explore three Indonesian senior high school graduates' motives as gap-year students. Two of them already passed their gapyear program while another one was still ongoing. A semi-structured interview was done to generate data from the participants. This study documented that the participants opted for an intensive English course prior to attending university learning. They also shared that the intensive course was used as self-enhancement both for academic English exposure that they would receive in the university and for social life to gain better future carrier in certain workplaces where English is highly needed.