Abstract

Covering an area of approximately 1.8 million square kilometers, and including a vast number of ethnic and linguistic groups, encompassing approximately 700 indigenous and minority languages, from varying cultural backgrounds, Indonesia presents a unique opportunity to examine how its education system addresses such a variety of needs across such a diverse context. Any second language education including English presents unique challenges in such a linguistically diverse landscape. Examining how such an education system addresses these challenges would be useful for policy makers, administrators, teacher educators, and teachers throughout the region as these stakeholders are faced with similar challenges in other Asian countries and beyond. In order to investigate how the Indonesian educational system prepares and responds to such a complex environment, participants for the current ongoing research project are drawn from four groups: Current preservice language educators, teacher educators, graduated/practicing teachers, and institutional leaders (principles, headmasters, etc.). In-depth individual or group interviews were conducted with members of each of the four groups. Classroom observations were also conducted with practicing teachers and are used to confirm information gathered through interviews as to actual practice in the language-learning classroom. The results of such research could be instrumental in providing a better understanding of the current situation of English language teacher education and teaching practice in Indonesia, as well as how to plan for future curricular developments. The results could also not only be valuable to policymakers and planners in Indonesia and across the Asian region but beyond in other contexts where learners represent a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds.