CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES
This study sought to investigate the real phenomena of teaching English in two different public elementary schools in Bandung Kulon Sub-district. The approach was developed to reveal at least two senses. The first was to identify the teachers’ beliefs of children, as they taught in elementary school. The second was to correlate their beliefs with their teaching practices in their classes.
5.1 Conclusions
The major conclusion of the study is that the teachers had positive beliefs about who children were. Most significantly, the teachers believed that the nature of children was to play and have fun. In their knowledge, children loved playing and having fun wherever and whenever they were. Despite attending the class to study, the children would use any opportunity to play games with their friends. It means that children were viewed as active individuals because they involved physical activities while playing. They also would make use of any object in their surrounding to visualize their imagination.
Children were believed to have high understanding towards people’s utterances, despite their limited resources. In addition, they could also make use of their limited resources to produce the language. As mentioned earlier, the teachers often met their students who tried to use English to greet their teachers.
In terms of analogy, the teachers believed that children were like a blank paper or canvas that could be sketched anything. What was sketched o the paper or canvas would reflect the children’s characteristics. Therefore, the interpretation would be that children were passive because they depended on what and who they encountered.
patterns in their mind so that they could not make mistakes in using the language, especially in doing the exercises in the textbooks. Beside that, they were also introduced to vocabularies and their translation in Bahasa Indonesia that they had to memorize. The students were not exposed to why they were required to do that, not to mention how to use those vocabularies. Without any context, they were told to recite the vocabularies.
Surprisingly, English language was used in their classroom, but it was not used as a means of communication—conveying ideas and thoughts. Rather, it was used to give instructions, sometimes irrelevant use of instructions. For example, the students were asked to stand up and sit down repeatedly without any purpose of doing so. Again, no context was established during the English language teaching and learning. Consequently, they could not develop more creative and various activities because their concern was on teaching the students not on how to make the students were able to use English purposefully.
As described In Chapter 2, there are two propositions regarding the teachers’ beliefs and the teaching practices. Some experts claimed that there is a high consistency between the teachers’ beliefs and their teaching practices, while the others suggested the contrary. Based on the investigation in this study, it seems that the second claim applies to this study. The teachers’ beliefs seem to be less consistent with what they performed in their English classes.
learning process. Thus, they can maintain the good things and help find ways out to cope with the problems.
Finally, it is also hoped that the relevant instances provide more trainings, seminars and workshops to the teachers of English in elementary schools. The trainings, seminars and workshops will benefit the teachers in more opening their horizons in teaching English to young learners. Such events will also provide the opportunities to meet with other teachers to share information and experiences with each other.
5.2 Recommendations for Further Studies
There are some limitations of the study, and the major one is the time allotment for this study. The study had limited time to explore more about the teachers’ perceptions and knowledge because they had tight schedule of teaching. They were also busy with their household matters, as all of them were family kind of people. Therefore, it is recommended to do further study with sufficient time with other teachers in wider scope. It is also suggested that the time be enough to explore more teachers’ perceptions and knowledge.
Moreover, though this study may not be generalisable to other settings, the most concern falls on the teaching practices that are suitable for children. Therefore, it is also recommended to those who have interests in EYL in public elementary school to design the English language teaching and learning, such as teaching techniques, that suits the conditions of the school, the students, and the teachers.
