ESSAY 3

AUTHENTIC TEACHING: IT’S TIME TO BRING THE SENSE OF UNIVERSE INTO THE CLASS

            Teaching, teaching, and teaching! What do you think about that? Are it just functioned as the transfer of knowledge, science, theory, value or maybe speech? If you assume that one of them is right, please think again. Recall your memory about what was your parent do to make you learn in the process of your growth. When you can’t speak, your mother always teach you how to speak naturally, isn’t it?   Do you know the technique used by your mother to do that? Are they immediately teach you about the language grammatical structure? I think it’s impossible because the children always learn about everything indirectly.  One of the techniques used is your parent always encourage you to interact with them by asking you to respond their speech continually. Whatever your respond your parent always give you applause, although sometimes your parent did not know about what did you talking about. Do you know what’s your parent means by letting you free to respond their speech? Because your parent wants you to learn naturally and authentically. In general, this is can be assumed as the nature of authentic teaching. Authentic teaching refers to the teaching activity executed by the teacher using the materials which comes from the daily life of the student that actually these materials are not intentionally made for the learning activity in the class as the parent who is always teach their children by using the material provided by them and by their environment. Unfortunately the concept of authentic teaching is begin to vanish when the children learn in the formal education institution such as in Elementary School, Junior High School, or Senior High School. It happened because the teachers of those schools mostly prefer use the textbook than create the materials themselves to undergo the teaching process no matter do this way is effective or not. They think that the textbook is everything, the textbook is the guidance, the textbook is the goal, and the textbook is the source of all learning source. To change these paradigms, this essay try to persuade the teachers of all education level to implement  the concept of authentic teaching into their class.  It wants to elaborate some advantages providing in the authentic teaching method,  viewed from Teacher’s role, the material’s use, the students role, and the effect of teaching to the students

           Teaching activity using authentic teaching method encourages the teacher’s role to gain the students’ motivation and students’ participation more effective and efficient. It caused by the basic concept of authentic teaching which can automatically invite the students’ participation in the learning process because basically these materials come from the students’ daily life. By using the Authentic Teaching, the teacher will knows about the background knowledge of the student. Background knowledge is the early ability of the student obtained from their environment. When the teachers know about the background knowledge of the student, they will be able to determine the teaching strategies used in the learning process. Authentic teaching also gives the teacher a wider space to be more creative in determining their teaching material to engages their background knowledge. An authentic teachers can used everything provided in the class to be a learning materials, for example, when the teacher teach about the descriptive text in English, they can use the picture provided in the class such as President and the vice president, heroes, or maybe the teacher can also use the properties of the class such as student chair, teacher’s table, teacher’s cupboard, and ruler rather than the teacher show the material and picture on the textbook. Unfortunately many teachers think that the preparation of the teaching activity in authentic teaching is wasting time, meanwhile the government have been determine the time allocation to undergo the learning process in the class during 1 semester. So, the teacher assumes that this teaching technique is impossible to cover all materials to be taught during 1 semester. Maybe, its becomes a big problem by the less experience teacher, but for the experienced teacher having been know about the concept of authentic teaching this is not a serious problem. They can ask the students to learn outside the class and learn together about the lesson given by using the material provided by the nature. This activity break the less experience teacher’s assumption that teaching activity using authentic materials are wasting time in preparation.

The second advantage provided by the authentic teaching is the material used. Materials’ used in this teaching method absolutely comes from the students’ environment. So,  the learning activity can be executed naturally. The authentic teaching try to make all materials provided by the nature become useful. The materials  also easy to gained by the teacher and do not require much money. According to Martinez (2000:1) the authentic  material makes the students can exposed to real discourse, as in videos of interview with famous people where intermediate students listen for general idea, it means that the authentic materials help  the students to have a link between the lesson learned and the students’ experience in the real life, so the learning activity is meaningful. Secondly, authentic materials keep students informed about what is happening in the world, so they have an intrinsic education value. The authentic material give a sense to the students that the world are always evolved and change periodically, it makes the students are able to think critically to the issues happened in the world and always think more about solution of the word problem then just gives some critics. Fourth, the authentic materials support the students to extend their vocabulary and to memorize them in a number of meaningful recycling. It indicates that the authentic materials also empower the students’ brain to memorize what they have learned easily.    

The third advantage is the students’ role. As we know that recently the world  education paradigm demanded the students to becomes the educational agent. Meanwhile the students need the new teaching strategies to accommodate these demand. Unfortunately some teaching strategies used by the teacher must be require the use of technology in the learning process, it invite the anxiety from the education’s experts because not all education institution applying the technologies in the learning process. To support the students fulfill the demand, the teacher should be determine the teaching strategies in the class with or without the support of technology. Authentic teaching here provide an active student’s participation system, where the students becomes the main actors of the leaning activity. the authentic materials make the students have the high sense of responsibility. It caused by the sense of belonging of the students. One major factors of the successful English learning and teaching is growing and embodying the sense of responsibility and the sense of belonging in the learning activity .  

The last advantage is the authentic teaching will give the long life learning experience to the student. The long life learning experience is very important for the student because the material learned will memorized in the long term memory. In the psychology science there are two memory systems containing in the brain. The first one is short term memory. The short term memory is the part of the brain that catch the memory and save it only for the short time. the second one is the long term memory, the long term memory can catch the memory and save it for a long time.  the long term memory usually used by the students to receive something meaningful in their life such as childhood memories, embarrassment memory, and exciting memories. while, the short term memory used by the students to remember something abstract which never embody on the students’ daily life such as theory, formulation, concept and system. The authentic teaching created to make not only the learning activity but also the learning materials can be received by the long term memory because the authentic teachers always try to give the student the concept together with the application in the daily life. In language science like English, when the authentic teachers teach about the sentence structure they will not teach about the concept and position of the subject and predicate in the sentences, but they will teach the use of this sentence, so the student will be able to know the function of the sentence in the daily communication. If the students know about the use of sentence, the students automatically becomes highly motivated to learn the language which directly gives the direct influence to the student to mastering the English language especially on the use of English sentences, and this is THE AUTHENTIC TEACHING.

Basically, the role of authentic teaching is bringing the science into the reality. Where everything that actually are not directed to the learning activity used as the learning materials. The authentic teaching are always try to raise the students background knowledge and engage the relationship between the students experience and the learning materials because the material learned mostly comes from the students’ daily life. It will makes the learning activity in the class meaningful and exciting. The authentic teaching method has a purpose to return the real concept of teaching having been long dissapeared that states: TEACHING IS NOT ONLY ABOUT AN EFFORT TO BRING THE KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE TO THE STUDENT, BUT ALSO IT’S AN EFFORT TO BRING THE SENSE OF UNIVERSE IN TO THE CLASS.