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On June 26th, 2009, LBPP-LIA conducted two one-day seminars for the Content teachers and the English teachers respectively in LBPP-LIA Yogyakarta with the theme ‘Learning English and Content’ and the title ‘ Enhancing Students’ Ability in Using English to Learn and Learning to Use English.’ The seminars were attended by 70 Content teachers and 27 English teachers, all of whom were assembled in the auditorium for the official opening by Drs. Alip Sudardjo Mpd, Kabid Dikmenti Dinas Propinsi DIY, who delivered his speech on the needs of Indonesian students to compete with the global world by ‘internationalizing’ Indonesian education system using Sekolah Berbasis International (International System-based Schooling) or CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). Afterwards, the Content teachers stayed in the auditorium for the seminar facilitated by Hafilia Ismanto and Ali aljufri, while the English teachers moved to room 318 to attend the session with Luz Ismail and Selestin Zainuddin.
The first two presenters in two different rooms – Ibu Hafilia and Ibu Luz – highlighted the widely conceived and perceived CLIL as a system in some established countries. In their elaboration, CLIL has been embraced in response to the increasing roles of political and economic aspects of the of the English speaking communities. The system requires not only English as the language of instructions, but also some feasibility and fitness in its curriculum, stakeholders and facilities. The speakers further asserted that the same trend may apply to Mandarin, as Chinese market power is starting the lead in the last decade. With CLIL, it is expected that teachers may not only teach language or the content, but they must teach both. Ibu Hafilia particularly asked whether the content teachers were ready and confident enough to implement the system in their schools.
Following the presentation session, Ibu Selestin led the English teachers to teach Geography, particularly about Australia and elicited from the participants what they had to pay attention to if they had to teach the lesson. Then she highlighted not only the vocabulary that the students could use in their Science subject , the functional expression that students needed for speaking skills, but also the basic grammar students needed to learn academic contents. While in the Content teachers session, then Ali Aljufri led an instructional workshop using a Math lesson. Using the prime and composite numbers, the teachers were challenged to make a number of classroom instructions in English. The participants enthusiastically simulated their teaching to the audience. The workshop, in fact, made the the content teachers realize that they need a lot of functional expressions to organize and conduct the classroom activities, especially in giving instructions to their students. At the end of the workshop, Ali Aljufri gave the participants some ready-to-use classroom instructions as feedback for their production.
In a heating atmosphere, the question raised by Ibu Hafil during the presentation session was eventually responded during the wrapping-up session where some teachers were totally up for the (CLIL) challenge, and some others were not. For example, Rini and Tusidi from SMP 5 said that there has been already collaboration between the Content teachers and the English teachers to implement CLIL, but in other schools, no collaboration exists. The reluctance of some content stems from the high challenge that teachers face – restarting learning. To encourage the Content teachers to use English in their classroom, Hafilia said that it was already good if the content teachers could open and close their sessions in English, then if they have already learned English, they could start using English in giving 25 percent of classroom instructions before they were confident using English for the whole session. However, Ibu Hafilia agreed that it is all up to both language and content teachers to respond to the challenge professionally.
