Pre-service Teachers’ Perception of Teaching Future EFL Students: A Micro-ethnography Approach

Abstract

As an archipelagic state, teaching English in Indonesia is not easy to deal with. Its diverse socio-cultural context causes the assumption that to teach English as a foreign language varies. This paper studies the pre-service students’ perspective on how to teach future EFL learners in the Indonesian context. The participants of this study were 150 pre-service teachers aged 20-24 years old who had comprehended such TEFL concept in the 50-hour course. Using a micro-ethnography approach, this issue was investigated and observed for one year. It tried to understand the perception of pre-service teachers in terms of putting theories into practices. To portray this perception, this study used fieldwork, interview and questionnaire. The result showed that students had a similar perception, in which they included the Indonesian context in designing a lesson as well as acting out as classroom teachers. In the interaction process, they tried to engage students with Indonesian context rather than English context. Yet, it results into bad implication in which both pre-service teachers and their future students will not learn English in the proper context. As pre-service teachers, they should not teach in their comfort zone and start to learn to include English socio-cultural context when they teach English.