Teaching Bahasa Indonesia: from American to Japanese Students

This February until mid-March, I will be teaching Bahasa Indonesia to international students from Kanda University, Japan, at Indonesian Studies Program of Malangkuçeçwara College of Economics.

Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program 2013:
Instructors and students with the Rector
of State University of Malang

This is my first involvement in this program despite I have been involved in similar program namely Critical LanguageScholarship (CLS) program sponsored by the U.S. State Department since 2011, where there are several American students who learn Bahasa Indonesia at Center of Indonesian Studies of State University of Malang.

Despite my major is English language teaching (ELT), the foundation is just the same with teaching Bahasa Indonesia to these students, teaching students with foreign (or second) language. I have been learning both theoretical and practical concepts of this language learning.

As I am facing different students, from different countries, the approaches are indeed different. For American students, a more free and critical discussion are preferable; in addition, the American students who participate in the CLS Program are mostly senior students and even doctoral students who study Asian Studies or even Indonesian studies at their university in America. Moreover, their expectation is very high! My passion in American culture as well as experience in learning in the United States in 2011 allow me to feel more comfortable being engaged in the language classroom activities.

with the students and instructors
during the opening ceremony of Program Bunga 2014
at Malangkucecwara College of Economics

On the other hand, Japanese students tend to be more passive. This might be some factors such as the learning culture in Japan or the students’ language proficiency level. As this is my first time teaching Bahasa Indonesia to Japanese students, I need to adjust myself and my teaching style into the more communicative one by inviting more students to get engaged into in-depth analysis and discussion, minimizing the gap between the instructors (sensei in Japan) and the students, standing on the equal position.

The other special thing being part of these programs is how I am standing not only as language instructor, but rather being figure who bridges the two different cultures. This is both interesting and challenging. This is interesting as knowing different perspectives allows me to be more tolerant, open-minded, as well as knowledgeable in terms of international studies. It is challenging as I need to open my eyes, both standing as an instructor as well as Indonesian ambassador to promote soft diplomacy within these countries.

This soft diplomacy, for me, is more effective is promoting more business as well as understanding within these countries in international world. This is the moment when I can promote Indonesian cultures to the international world as well as improve the cooperation within these countries.

Make it concise: some ideas for your college essay

When you are about to write for your college admission essay, something sticking in mind is that you will explain as detail as possible; this is true that you should write it with your personal creativity, telling the readers into a personal and original idea with impression. Yet, keep in mind that you just have 500 words at most for your essay.

Some students think they will conduct tens revisions for their final essay as they have drafted hundreds of words essay. This might be possible to write essay not to exceed the limit—or just few words to the limit! The question: why do we need to bother ourselves with this unprepared topic and essay? There are some ideas on how to write great and concise essay for your college admission.

First, know where to start for your essay. You cannot write about your vacation in Hawaii, and you start it from the time you wake up in your room. Get the points that matter most! There are many good stories; it is a matter of determining the most significant.

Your language style is very important. Just imagine when you look at someone at the very first time; you might not think about his/her hobby at first; the impression must go to the outlook! Yes, essay is just like this one. You may organize your essay as flowing as possible. Starting from impressive opening until concise explanation, just consider that the reader seems listening to your great story without any feeling of being lectured or even judged.

Mind the adjectives! It is very important to choose the precise adjective for your writing in order to explain the object you are talking about. But somehow many students put overuse adjectives just to talk about a thing; too many words count may be traced back to an overuse of word forms that often muck things up. This case is also applied for the qualifiers and adverbs. The point is the diction for these elements is very important to make your writing more witty and concise.

The last thing is your sentence structure. Don’t make people reading your essay confused with strange sentence structure! Try to make standard structure for your sentences. Take the ideal sentence structure is started by subject and predicate. Just as simple as that! The next thing related to the sentence structure is the grammatical aspect; this is the time for you to spend some moment to examine your grammatical aspect.

Keep those simple things when you think you are ready to start writing your essay. Revision for your words count is also important; but you just need to keep the ideas above in mind to avoid redundancy in revision and fear of overuse of words for your essay. Good luck!