A Study of Parental Perception towards the Removal of English from Primary Schools' Local Content Curriculum

摘要

Early introduction of English in the schooling system has become prevalent in this globalized world. The notion that English is required for highly competitive societies put the government under pressure to articulate an early primary school English program. It is commonly perceived that there is more opportunity for the children to acquire high proficiency in a target language when they are exposed earlier to that language. The increasing demands of parents who see English as the key to their children's educational success have become another pressure. In Indonesian context, regardless of the shortage of EFL teachers at schools, parents insist that the schools have to teach English. Furthermore, they challenged the school to teach English as one of the core subjects instead of putting it as an additional subject or the so-called Local Content Subject (LC). However, current curriculum (2013 Curriculum) policy has excluded English as an LC subject. Most schools have removed the English teaching from their schools; given that the subject is no more included in primary school curriculum. This study aimed at investigating parents' perception towards this removal. It revealed that despite their challenge towards necessitating schools to put English as a core subject, parents agreed to a certain extent that English should at least exists as school subject as it did, a local content subject. They argued that having English as an LC is much better than having their children not learning English at all. Their belief about the implication of the removal of English from school subjects would result in detrimental effects; such as delayed mastery of English which in turn will make their children less competitive in the world of work.