Local Cultural Practices in Teacher Agentic Responses to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Curriculum: A Lesson Learned from Indonesia

Abstract

The new 2013 curriculum has enforced English teachers in Indonesia to use the scientific approach teaching steps (i.e. observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating) to help students attain the national goals of English language learning. This prescribed teaching procedure has been dispatched by nationally trained national instructors who in turn trained local teachers. Despite the national and local trainings, individual teachers might use their own strategies possible, practical and appropriate to the nature of their students and local English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts. Based on data obtained from ethnographic classroom observations in a rural Indonesian school in Lombok Indonesia, the study found that the teachers enact their agency by using local cultural practices as teaching strategies in their ELT classrooms given the conditions of the students, school and the community. This article discusses the nature of local cultural practices used in the English lessons during the study. Local cultural practices used were examined within the dialectical concepts of localness (i.e. nationally-local, provincially-local and locally-local). It then continues by describing how the teachers have used them as strategic ways of responding to the national policy, either in the forms of dedication, accommodation, or resistance strategies. The study would hopefully provide important insights regarding local appropriation of the macro level policy.