Teaching English as Foreign Language Problems

By Azys Syaiful Anwar 

Since English is foreign language, learning English for Indonesian may be difficult. Learning foreign language isn’t as easy as learning second language. When learning second language, people may have many chances to practice it in the community. Meanwhile, it is almost impossible to use foreign language in the indonesian community. For that reason, Teaching English is considered as a difficult job which demands the specific skills. 

Some teaching method has been improved to enhance the quality of teaching and learning, such as TPR, Communicative approach, direct method, etc. However, there are still many problems during the Teaching English as Foreign Language (TEFL). During my first TEFL (as an English instructor trainee) in a junior school in Boyolali, I got several problems, such as: 

Students’ low motivation in learning English 

Sometime, I meet students with low interest in learning, esspecially English. They tend to think that English is too dificult to learn and it doesn’t applicable in the real community. 

The lack of vocabulary mastery of the students 

Students have less vocabulary mastery because they rarely get vocabularies from their own comprehension. They only commit to memory some difficult words and their meaning. 

The bad management of the teachers 

Not only from students, I also confess that sometimes I made mistakes in teaching. Managing students may be a problem. In certain classes, I need to determine proper teaching methods. 

TEFL is considered to be more difficult than  teaching both mother tongue and second language. There are many problems which can be found during its process. Through this writting, I just want to share my experiences and hopefully you give appropriate solutions for those problems.