Paper Summary of Establishing a Rich Language Learning Environtment to Support Young Learners’ English Literacy Skills in Bali by L.P. Artini

Paper Summary of Establishing a Rich Language Learning Environtment to Support Young Learners’ English Literacy Skills in Bali by L.P. Artini

(November 17^th, 2014)

English as basic component in education especially in Bali. The policy start in 1994 by offering English in primary school as local content in the curriculum. There are lack of information, learning tool and facilities for the teacher who Teaching English for Young Learners (TEYL) in a few years of the implementation of the policy. The master trainers disseminated new and innovative strategies for teaching English for young learners to English teachers in their districts. As a result, teachers might change their mindset from teaching about the language to teaching how to use the language. Teachers were encouraged to facilitate the young learners to experience the language use creatively.

Time allocation for teaching english was not supported by learning environment and positive language. The time allocation also barely maintained learners’ enthusiasm for learning English. They had to wait for a week to have another English lesson. Meanwhile, learning materials to support English language exposure beyond the classroom are also not available.

The roles of teachers who teach English for young learners at school; First, teachers are responsible to make out the daily routines of the classroom which concerned to all school subjects. Second, teachers was training for English language. To maintaining pupil enthusiasm to learn English not only teacher’s responsibility in the primary school but also parents job. Rich Language Learning Environtment focus on to make easily accessed, readily available, various in forms and with an eyecatching appearance especially in reading and writing English.

This paper commonly focus on strategies to improve classroom activities. Most studies are concerned with the intellectual quality of the pedagogical dimension. In learning a language (especially a foreign language) ideally supported by a ‘rich language learning environment’ so that children can learn through real activities and learning should not only occur inside the class only, but also outside of the class in the learners’ convenient time.

There are two major reason why teaching of English start early in primary schools in Bali; First, young learners possess a language acquisition to learn a new language relatively faster than adults. Second, Bali is an international tourist destination, that effected attitudes towards the language and visiting by native speakers of the language and motivated a young learner strong motivation to learn the language.

Children’s learning characteristics and real life contexts for children to consider learners’ language need. The materials must be attractive to the children with interesting illustrations or pictures. provides different types of texts to attract learners to observe, pay attention to, and follow up by doing independent work in RLLE journals. The independent work here includes writing, listing topical vocabularies, and using everyday expressions and stories. The materials are exposed to the learners every day on a specially designed display board in the classroom that is easily understood and organized in an interesting way.

Methods of this paper follows Dick and Carey’s (1990) model of educational research and development that comprises eight stages: needs analysis, instructional analysis, learners and context analysis, setting up goals, assessment instrument development, instructional strategy development, instructional material development and selection, summative evaluation development, and implementation. The five schools were located in three different regencies of Bali. The reasons for selecting these schools was because the English teachers there had experienced being trained by the master trainers on teaching English in Primary Schools as mentioned above.

The result was shown that Grade 4, 5, and 6 classrooms effectively attracted the attention of the students by using variety of texts that were displayed on the board in front of the class. By using display text of materials made students reacted positively. It is assumed that the strength of the pictures or illustrations was in their close fit to the everyday life of the children who were predominantly Balinese. In addition, both diversity of images and authenticity of photos added to the interpretive value of textual materials. For the same items as in the pre test, in the post-test learners also demonstrated improvement in their ability to rewrite sentences or expressions correctly and with confidence.

The result reveals the most significant improvement occurred in the level of vocabulary (88.7%). Intensive exposure to printed words in English impacts positively on students’ awareness of words; their meaning and spelling. Exposure to words supplemented with interesting pictures seemed to be effective for young learners to remember. The use of appropriate media helps young learners to activate that dynamic quality to learn more effectively. The least improvement was in writing a short text (39.8%).

The ability to remember and spell words is obviously easier than combining words into grammatically correct sentences. The more difficult the textual task the slower the improvement that can be achieved. This finding implies that at the primary school level, English texts and tasks need to be introduced in a carefully ordered sequence of complexity so that learning progress will occur optimally. As Scott & Ytreberg (2004) point out, formal learning of a foreign language is not enough. Supplementary materials are needed to optimize learner achievement. RLLE exposure gives students the opportunity to read and write in their own time. As stated in the document of the Department of National Education (2009), English in primary schools is supposed to be focused on spoken language, that is, learners are trained to listen, repeat, follow instructions and respond to simple questions or elicitations. It is stated that one of the goals of the English subject in primary schools is to develop communication competence in the form of language accompanying action.