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. 184 | P a g e