Thesis Defense, In-Class Debate: Critical Thinking for Language Classroom

After conducting one year research for my Master’s thesis, finally I got approval for the examination in front of Board of Examiners (Dr. Mirjam Anugerahwati, M.A and Prof. Dr. Punaji Setyosari, M.Ed.) in the mid of June. I have been conducting a study focusing on the critical thinking in academic debate practices and how possible integration of the practices in accommodating critical thinking into language learning in the form of in-class debate.

 

Guk Sueb posing after the thesis defense in H3.108 Hall
of Graduate Program of State University of Malang
left-right: Prof. Bambang Y. Cahyono, Guk Sueb,
Dr. Mirjam Anugerahwati, M.A., Prof. Dr. Yazid
Basthomi, M.A. and Prof. Dr. Punaji Setyosari

Since I presented the thesis proposal in 2013, my advisor told me, repeatedly, that my proposal seemed a huge and ambitious project. Moreover, my advisor was breaking down my proposal even into three theses: observatory grounded-theory study, research and development, and class action research. He emphasized that I needed to scoop down—or, choose one of the section—being the focus of the study.

I decided to switch the focus of the study to observatory grounded-theory study concerning on the principles and instructional strategies in academic debate practices in accommodating critical thinking and how those instructions could be integrated into language classroom context.

The following is the abstract of my Master’s thesis:

Critical Thinking Reflected in Academic Debate Practices for English Language Classroom

Keywords: in-class debate, academic debate practices, critical thinking, language learning

Critical thinking has become one important educational goal over the last two decades. Therefore, critical thinking competence is considered as one of essential cognitive skills to be acquired by the learners in learning process. This research was aimed at affirming the integration of critical thinking through in-class debate activities by observing the possible model of critical thinking reflected in academic debate practices in Indonesia. More particularly it focuses on the attitude of Indonesian debaters towards critical thinking, how the critical thinking is reflected in the debate, how the critical thinking is accommodated in academic debate including the interactions in academic debate practices, and the possibility in the integration of critical thinking in academic debate practices into language classes based on the principles of language pedagogy. This qualitative study involved two major academic debate communities, Malang Debating Union (MDU) and JogjakartaDebating Forum (JDF), during regular practices and competitions. There are four findings from this study. First, the attitude of debaters towards critical thinking was positive; this includes clear stance to controversial issues, objective and relevant data, and logical reasoning. This was to refute the previous assumptions that critical thinking is Western-tailed culture and Asian students tend to be hierarchical in thinking. Second, the critical thinking of the debaters was reflected through their debate performance, both spoken and written forms. Debaters showed clear assertion with multi-layer reasoning, and the use of relevant data and fallacy. The next finding is based on the observations to the academic debate practices which concerned the critical thinking aspects through some activities and instructions; the aspects cover the clarity and logical reasoning, independence and autonomy in learning, and coach’s instructions to the debaters, reflections towards the issues (motions) in debate. Lastly, the possible in-class debate to integrate critical thinking should refer to the academic debate practices in the forms of some formats which are in line with the principles of language pedagogy.

For the accomplishment of this thesis, I would like to give my best gratitude to my advisors: Prof. Bambang Yudi Cahyono, Ph.D and Prof. Dr. Yazid Basthomi, MA for being the best academicians at the campus and in this country. The other acknowledgement is for the debating society in Indonesia for the commitment to debate proliferation in Indonesia.

IGSCI 2013: Fulfilling Children’s Right, Introducing sensitive issues into classes in time of responsible society

As language teachers, especially foreign language teachers, in 21st Century, we live in such critical moment. In this time, in this complex live and society, we face serious global issues of terrorism, ethnic conflict, social inequality, injustice, religious conflicts, racial segregation, and environmental destruction. How can we prepare our students to cope with these problems? What is our responsibility as language teachers in a world of war, poverty, prejudice, and natural destruction/pollution?

Guk Sueb and Niki Raga Tantri
with Prof. Budi Darma
during Sang Guru 2 International Conference
at State University of Surabaya

It is not easy task for us to provide understanding to the students about those issues. This month, Niki Raga Tantri and I have opportunity to present our paper during International Graduate Student Conference on Indonesia (IGSCI) 2013, Gajah Mada University Jogjakarta. Our paper focuses on how to bring sensitive issues in the classroom, especially language classroom of secondary level. Here is the abstract of our paper presented during the IGSCI 2013:

Introducing sensitive issues in ELT classes of secondary schools in time of responsible society

Guk Sueb & Niki Raga Tantri

Graduate School in English Language TeachingState University of Malang, Indonesia

ABSTRACT
Raising a child is probably the most gratifying job any of educators will ever have—and one of the toughest. In large part, that is because times have changed. We live in an increasingly complex world that challenges us every day with a wide range of disturbing issues that are difficult for children to understand and for adults to explain. All teachers will inevitably teach about sensitive topics in their classes, especially classes that will deal with international perspectives such international studies and English language teaching (ELT) that occurs in secondary schools in Indonesia. These sensitive topics may range from racism, forced labor or slavery to bullying, sexual orientation, gender biases, poverty, diseases, disaster — and may be completely unexpected. Any topic of a sensitive nature may make even the best of teachers uncomfortable when exploring the topic with students. Despite the emergence of the concept of cross cultural understanding in ELT, but mostly the natural reaction of the English language teachers is often to shy away from difficult or controversial topics, or to approach them from a superficial, strained or half-hearted standpoint, or even try to avoid these topics, leaving the secondary children into confusion as they will face the global challenges for the upcoming years. But many times these topics are crucially important to students’ development and awareness of the world and its social, moral, political and civic underpinnings. Students of secondary schools deserve to be taught about these topics in authentic, engaging and purposeful ways.  This is the teachers who deal with global development perspective should have foundation in introducing sensitive issues to the children in their classes.

Keywords: sensitive issues, child’s development, tolerance, responsible society

There will be more than eighty papers during this conference. Further update about the conference will follow.

The Use of Twitter in Language Learning

Guk Sueb during Sang Guru
International Conference presentation
of his paper focusing on the use of
Twitter in language classroom.

Twitter timeline is viewed as a supplement to practice in authentic environment different aspects of the target language as it was taught in the classroom. One aspect of language learning which can be practiced in Twitter is communicative competence (Hymes, 1976), a concept based on a view of language learning postulated in the communicative approach to language teaching, in which interaction is focused as a means of language learning and teaching.

Nowadays, new vast development of technologies has become the basic grounds in society; therefore, it is necessary to help learners develop skills and abilities with these new technologies coming up in their everyday lives. According to the UNESCO (2002) “ICT adds value to the processes of learning, and in the organization and management of learning institutions. The Internet is a driving force for much development and innovation in both developed and developing countries.” It is widely believed through various studies that the development of the technology has facilitated the making of good use of teaching amenities and provided rich resources to help improve their teaching devices and to adopt new and advanced teaching facilities.

In order to incorporate new technologies in primary education, this fact has established a milestone because it benefits students’ autonomy (Benson, 2001:2), since these online resources provide more freedom and flexibility to learn at their own pace and convenience. In relation to the use of Twitter in learning process, it is based on the benefits of Twitter of which are the most up-to-date source that can be accessed by public. Thus, this study employs Twitter due to the prime-time topics for the base of classroom discussions; instead of retrieving the past events, Twitter will accommodate the hype of the topics and triggers the students to use their autonomy learning beyond the classroom.

By seeing the usefulness, Twitter is a fantastic learning tool due to its potential to improve students’ motivation, not only by triggering the use of the language (from various styles) in a meaningful and authentic way, but also because students can create and reflect their ideal lives as well as what is happening outside there through Twitter timeline. The latter is a theoretical framework proposed by Dörnyei (2005) and refers to the representation of all the attributes that a person would like to possess (e.g. hopes, aspiration, desires, etc.). In this case, learners would present their ideal self with the association of the mastery of the second language, which is, becoming more proficient in the L2 and taking it one step forward by integrating him/herself into the language community.

The question is then can we really use Twitter in language learning and teaching? According to Meabh Ritchie, in the April 2009 Times Education Supplement article, micro-blogging can have the following pros for education: it could help develop fluency in written and oral skills; students could learn how to focus on what they say better (they can only use 140 characters); through tweeting themselves, teachers can differentiate and help to reinforce what they have introduced in their classrooms; finally, micro-blogging can lead to more interactive and swift discussions. Also let’s not forget that micro-blogging can add to metacognitive work, i.e. reflexive learning. Tweets can also be used to ask questions and hunt for instant points of view.

Of those advantages of the use of Twitter in language learning, here are some systematic and brief reasons on how the utilization of Twitter in language learning will be justifiable:

1.     Relevance: many students already use Twitter in their own language as well as their foreign language (target language). It has become a part of social, business and academic discussions and it has already entered mainstream communication.

2.     Real-time: as the language instructors start classroom discussion, it is expected that the discussion is about something that being hype in the daily life. The discussion might be started through newspaper headlines until some serious topics that might be controversial. The easiest way to find the common topics is by highlighting the trending topic feature on Twitter.

3.     Distinct style: the brevity of twitter (each message is limited to 140 characters) means that the writing has a different style from other online writing (e.g. emails and blog posts or even online newspapers). With this brevity, the students need not to read a lot but understanding the heading of the discussion. Should the discussions requires deeper analysis, this is the follow-up activities that will be utilized by the instructors to invite the students to learn beyond the classroom wall.

Twitter can be used for stand-alone activities or it can easily be combined with other classroom or homework tasks. It is a way to keep students in contact, to emphasize fluency in communication and to focus on conciseness and accuracy.

1.     Following Conversations: students can follow public conversations regardless of whether they even have their own twitter account. This is because Tweets (each comment in Twitter) are usually publically viewable.

2.     Following Others: students can ‘follow’ (i.e. subscribe) to the twitter accounts of mainstream media to receive regular updates on topics of interest.

3.     Tweeting in a Community: students can share ideas (via twitter) with others in their class on an ongoing basis – the class could have a common tag or simply all become friends (i.e. follow each other). This activity can be added to other activities for example as part of an assignment, the student could twitter their thoughts on an article they have read (or indeed, a tweet), or a video they have watched.

4.     Twitterature or live-tweet: summarizing articles or even whole works of literature into tweets (known as Twitterature), helps the learners focus on what the original text is fundamentally about (in their opinion). Learners can also collaboratively write a piece – perhaps with each tweet as a chapter.

For this paper, the use of Twitter is to update the real-time information especially from the official newspapers accounts and/or notable figures such as politicians, scholars, celebrities, and so forth. This will specify the discussion as well as the limit the scope of the discussions; whereas, the students are not restricted to following those only accounts, but those are recommended for them.

Sang Guru 2: Twitter for language classroom discussion

This weekend, I will attend an international conference in language teaching at State University of University (UNESA). The conference at UNESA is named Sang Guru 2, hosted by Faculty of Cultural Studies. This will be my second opportunity to present my paper on such ELT conference. The previous opportunity was during NELTAL 2013 at State University of Malang.

This time, I will discuss about the utilization of technology in language learning, in specific the use of Twitter for classroom discussion. The idea of this paper is the accessibility of Twitter by most of the students and this is the job of the language instructors to utilize this for classroom activities. Here is the abstract of my paper.

“What’s up?”Twitter timeline as speaking prompts and language classroom discussion

The emergence of social media such as Twitter provides the most up-to-date information and might trigger the curiosity of the learners about the topics being discussed. As language teachers, we should be aware of this phenomena as the learners are not only the consumers of the information, rather the students actively contribute their idea through micro-blogging as well as discussions on various forums. This idea might be beneficial to utilize Twitter timeline as speaking prompts in language classroom and the students are invited to deliver their idea through classroom discussion. There have been various studies that focus on the benefits of using writing and speaking prompt to improve language skills, but there should be further study in more specifics that there is huge potential of optimizing the practice of utilizing the most up-to-date topics such as headline news on Twitter timeline; the students are encouraged to optimize their strategic investment in gathering information beyond the classroom. The students will discuss the topics into as well as analyze the content into discourse level in order to boost their language communication competence.

This paper specifically discusses Twitter timeline of some various accounts, especially official newspapers and notable figures, as the speaking prompts and classroom discussion in language learning. The timeline of those accounts will be utilized as the daily activities, such as the base of classroom discussion. Secondly the paper also discusses about the justification to the emergence of Twitter timeline as the materials for the language learning and the suitability to the students. 

There are also some recommendations toward the applications and methods on how to utilize Twitter timeline in language classroom, including how the teachers deal with such sensitive and controversial issues from the Twitter timeline. Lastly, this paper will also provide the prospective utilization of Twitter on any other language classroom activities. 

The update from Sang Guru 2 international conference will follow soon. Have a great one!

NELTAL 2013: Why should we reconsider newspapers as authentic materials in language class?

The elusive definitions of the terms ‘authentic’ and ‘authenticity’ and their application to language learning have been the subject of great discussions over the past three decades. The notion of the use of authentic materials as tools in language teaching once emerged in 1970s, following with the trend of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). The CLT concept rejected the previous structurally formed language learning approaches, replacing with the authentic learning with authentic sources, materials that are made by native speakers for native speakers (Rodgers and Medley, 1988), that are genuineness, realness, truthfulness, validity, reliability, undisputed credibility and legitimacy of materials or practices (Tatsuki, 2006). This notion of genuineness has even been under debate as the spread of English as international language as well as the cult of the English language writers/contributors (both native and non-native speakers) through the Internet.

Should we find the basic premise of using authentic materials in language learning, it stems from the desire to give learners “real” language. There are many studies that are concerned with using effective authentic materials in language classrooms. Most of the studies asserting the effectiveness of the authentic materials are concerned with students’ engagement with classroom activities (considered as motivation in language learning). Based on Peacock’s study in analyzing the effects of authentic materials and students’ motivation in South Koreans asserts, however, that there is not significant relationships between the use of authentic materials and students’ motivation; thus, the relationship between the two should be treated in different circumstance, which is not merely about the use of authentic materials that affects the students’ motivation, especially for the EFL learners (Peacock, 1997).

In modern methodology, there seems a trend of utilizing authentic material in the English language lesson, and this is the teachers that know what the most appropriate materials for the students. As a result, they are perfectly able of selecting the most appropriate material to be used in class. Presently, the use of magazines and newspapers in English lessons is widely acknowledged, since they provide stimulating texts full of cultural information to students who have a wide range of interests. According to Doff and Jones (1997: 170), once the appropriate text has been selected, students usually get interested in reading, listening and watching, since they regard English texts and programs not merely as a tool to learn a language, but also as a source of information. 

These flourishing beliefs, however, undermine the other aspects of the students in dealing with authentic materials like the variety of the students’ stances/beliefs (especially when we are talking about the difference between the target language culture compared to the students’ native culture), the needs of the students, and also the level of proficiency of the students. These aspects, in fact, may contribute a lot into the effectiveness of the students in acquiring the target language. Take one of the most common used authentic materials in language class is newspaper. Newspaper is not as simple written texts; it becomes the richest texts containing information, news, opinion, culture clashes and also the power-led discourse. These contents may affect the students’ psychological aspect, worse when the students have negative attitude to the contents, especially with the exaggerated and exploited news about poverty and discrimination, injustice, and violence.

Focusing on the use of the newspaper as authentic materials in the language classroom, there are even many different stances both pro and cons. Flowerdew and Peacock (2001:182) find three arguments for and another three against  authentic  materials. In favor: non-authentic texts cannot represent real-world language use, simplified materials often lose some meaning and the real-world situations the learners will face are best prepared for with authentic texts. On the other hand, the other cons are that any one authentic text may not be authentic for a specific class and the learners’ needs, just because a text is authentic does not mean it is relevant, and authentic texts are often too difficult linguistically.

...

this is the background of my article presented during NELTAL 2013 held at March 30th, 2013, State University of Malang.

NELTAL 2013: Increasingly recognized, the more prestigious

National English Language Teachers and Lecturers (NELTAL) Conference 2013 conducted by the Language Centre in collaboration with the English Department of the Faculty of Letters State University of Malang was over last week (30/3). The conference was attended by hundreds of participants from various regions in Indonesia, both work as teachers, lecturers, and practitioners.

Me and some of my colleagues of
State University of Malang and Education University of Indonesia
with Prof. Bambang Yudi Cahyono, Ph.D.

In his speech at the opening, Dr. Yazid Basthomi as vice dean of academic affairs of the Faculty of Letters, NELTAL 2013 has wider recognition from the various national parties. In this fifth year, NELTAL 2013 has had a remarkable achievement with over 95 presenters, in the topic of media in teaching English.

In addition to paper presentations by teachers, lecturers and practitioners, there was also a seminar by Effendy Kadarisman, Ph.D. which discussed about a look of linguistic in to English language teaching. There was also TEFL workshops conducted by Professors of State University of Malang and other senior practitioners from various institutions. With the conference agenda which lasted for 8 hours, all in the conference rooms were filled by the participants.

Of the many papers were collected and presented, some will be selected to be a compilation of papers under supervision of Prof. Bambang Yudi Cahyono, Ph.D. This compilation book would be an achievement for practitioners of the field of English language teaching.

At the end of the event, Prof. Bambang Yudi Cahyono chair as well as prominent figures in ELT in Indonesia said that next year NELTAL 2014 will also be held at about March 2014, with the theme of success stories of English language teaching.