Fighting a Losing Battle : English for Academic Purposes in Indonesia

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English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in Indonesia seems to fail for a number of reason. This paper discusses EAP at the undergraduate as well as the graduate level. The undergraduate students are actually not ready yet to tackle academic textbooks as their English language preparation at the senior high school is insufficient to meet the challenge of reading scientific textbooks. The objectives of teaching English at the senior high school are overly ambitious, that is to achieve high proficiency in the four skills, whereas there are so many constraints making the ideal objectives unattainable, such as limited amount of time, low frequency of class sessions, big classes, changing methods following fashion, final examination incommensurate with curriculum objectives, etc. Accountability is also non-existent, that is the grade a student gets from his final examination is not reflective of his real achievement. When college students start reading assignments in English they get frustrated as their English proficiency to understand them is far from sufficient. At the high school they were not trained to read long complicated discourses, only brief passages for intensive reading comprehension, thus the textbooks are too overwhelming for them. There is also a mismatch of perception between theirs and the EAP teachers', that is they want general English for future use, i. e., job-oriented, whereas the teachers want them to be able to read English academic texts. Another problem is that EAP is given in the first semester, whereas the subject-matter teachers assign English texts only when they are already at least in the third semester. Thus the students do not see the relevance of EAP when they were in the first semester. Another big stumbling block for the success of EAP is the Indonesian language, as now texts in Indonesian are available in virtually any field, be they originally written by Indonesians in translation. As a result, students are reluctant to learn English because they can access enough information easily in Indonesian. In other words, in many disciplines they can now graduate without knowing English. At the postgraduate level the situation is different as 75-100% of required references are in English. It is here that they complain most and are literally scared of English. They realize that they badly need the ability to read English texts, but their own ability is down below the minimum level. Only less than 10% of them can read English texts comfortably, and so the rest are desperate. The only solution is to seek assistance from translation services which abound around the campus. However, the translation is frequently confusing, as the translators are mostly students from the English department who are not knowledgeable about disciplines outside their own specialization. In addition, translation takes time and costs a lot of money, but they have no choice. Even if they take an English course, now it is too late for them to learn, as they have so many assignments that they do not have much time to learn English (again).

Fighting a Losing Battle : English for Academic Purposes in Indonesia

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