International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 184
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
nationalist indigenous actors; (b) Christian as well as Catholics missionaries; and (c) modern
Islamic institutions, i.e. Persyarikatan Muhammadiyah played significant roles in
propagating the education to the neglected-indigenous population; (3) finally support from
the U.S via the Ford Foundation which promulgated the soft core of the English department
curriculum and in-service training for teachers of English. Although Dutch colonial
government support to the education during the Ethical Policy was considered little, the
impact of creating western-educated indigenous nationalists and a modern Islamist elite
was influential in creating their own ideological education institutions which then spread
over Indonesia and touched a more popular ground at the level of mass education. The
private initiatives from nationalists and religious missions’ movements were then continued
after Indonesia reached its Independence. During the Japan and Sukarno reigns, English
teaching was not so enhanced due to the anti-western policy set by both political actors.
During Sukarno’s reign, however, the U.S had helped in designing the syllabus of English
teaching via the Ford Foundation in the hope that in the course of the Cold War, the more
left-leaning Indonesian president would not adopt communism into the new state. The first
seed disseminated through in-service training for English teachers and materials
development were imported within the paradigm of American English. Almost all of
Indonesian universities advocated the entrant for universities’ teachers as the TOEFL test
rather than IELTS. American English paints the color of Indonesian English nowadays since
the policy adopted by Suharto was in accordance with the U.S in the post Cold-War era.
Being not colonized by the British, Indonesia adopted American English rather than British
English which had been adopted in Malaysia. The stronghold of English language in Malaysia
was dated formerly before World War II when the British colonizer spent much of its
financial effort to educate the Empire. Compared to Indonesia, the Dutch spent the least on
education among the European colonizers in South East Asia. This resulted in double
jeopardy in the formative era of education in Indonesia where most of the people were not
literate. The fostering of education was strongly emphasized during Suharto’s reign when he
adopted a capitalistic policy in developing the country’s economy. English became the sole
choice of foreign languages to challenge the global power from the 1980s onward. From the
onset of the 1980s, the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) expanded overnight
and spread over to Indonesia. The quality of TEFL in Indonesia is, however, still a work in
progress.
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