Issues of Curricular Innovation: Teachers' Fidelity of Implementation of Communicative Competence in English Language Teaching for Senior High Schools in East Java, Indonesia (A Case Study)

Abstract

<p>Despite the significant nature and idealistic intention of curricular innovations provided by the Indonesian Government, many researchers argue that the innovations still have not been able to substantially improve the outcomes of school-level English learning in Indonesia. Lie (2007) and Mattarima & Hamdan (2011), for example, found that very few high school graduates were able to communicate intelligibly in English. Triastuti (2011), Sukyadi (2015), and Ningsih (2016) found problems in the implementation of the Genre-Based Approach (GBA) included in the curricular innovations. Widodo (2016) found that most of the curricular innovations, including the newest 2013 curriculum, were driven by ideological and political agendas rather than by pedagogical reasons, so the theoretical foundations are questionable. Other researchers such as Madya (2007), Marcellino (2008), Jazadi (2000) had reported problems in the implementation of the curricular innovations. However, there is still little research that looks at these problems from the teacher's perspective.</p> <p>This study is an attempt to fill this gap. By using the Fidelity Perspective (Snyder, Bolin, & Zumwalt, 1992) and the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) (George, Hall, & Stiegelbauer, 2006), the study was planned to find out how these curricula were actually implemented by the teachers (Penuel, Phillips, & Harris, 2014): it therefore examined the implementation of the 2004 and 2006 English curricula for secondary education in Indonesia from the English teachers’ perspectives. The main research question of this study was: to what extent or degree of fidelity did the English teachers implement the 2004 and the 2006 English curricula for senior high schools and why?</p> <p>delity of implementation by the teachers was at the stages of <i>management</i> (stage 3) and <i>consequence</i> (stage 4). These stages were related to macro socio-political factors. In addition, since, on the one hand, they had been instructed to follow the directions given to them, their Levels of Use (LoU) category of the curriculum innovation was <i>mechanical use</i> (level III). On the other hand, they had also made adaptations based on their own contexts, hence their LoU category was <i>refinement </i> (level IVB). ‘<i>Refinement</i>’ was achieved by reducing the requirements of the curriculum, and, hence, the teachers could claim that it was still in line with the school-based <i>management</i> concept.</p> <p>This study found that the 2004 and the 2006 curriculum documents and the way these curricula were introduced to teachers did not fully meet the criteria of good quality curriculum practices and, therefore, teachers as the main implementers of the curricula had to implement them in limited ways by making adaptations. However, these adaptations were still considered understandable and acceptable in the context of the concept of school-based curriculum.</p>