TEACHERS’ COMPETENCES IN TEACHING ENGLISH TO YOUNG LEARNERS INELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Abstract

Teaching English to young learners in elementary schools has been conducted for years as a local content in Indonesia. English can be interpreted as the introduction of foreign language in elementary school and as the preparation of facing English injunior high school, therefore it is recommended. Unfortunately the instruction has not shown promising pictures. This research aimed to explore the teachers’ competencesin the classroom in order to gather detailed and relatively complete informationabout the instruction and to describe the problems of teaching English. This is a case study which involved four English teachers in three elementary schools in regency in West Java. The data are taken from interviews, observations, and documents. Basedon the result of the analysis of data from multiple sources, it can be concluded that English teachers did not have sufficient technical, pedagogical skills, interpersonal and personal qualities. Two reasons seem to have caused the problems. First ismajority of the teachers do not come from an English education academic background and second is minimum opportunities for the teachers to upgrade their knowledge and skills after graduating. What makes situation even worse these teachers are never supervised and they are given only very limited time for teaching. These problems hinder the teacher professionalism and students’ proficiency. Therefore, it can be concluded that the teaching English to young learners in this particular regency is not yet satisfactory. Finally, all these indicate that the English teachers need teacher development to improve their knowledge and skills.