English language in Indonesia is considered a foreign language or in short, EFL. Other countries who have English as their second language (ESL) usually would make use of the language better and can be found encountering using English much often than the EFL countries. Although Indonesia is an EFL country, doesn’t mean that it is rather difficult to find people who are good at English. The fact that English has become global and used as an official language in many non-English speaking countries, makes English these days being planted into people’s mindset to think that it’s an important subject to learn even in Indonesia. Especially in this era, you can easily find advertisements, articles, news, and even Instagram captions in English. Even though one person hasn’t mastered English, they are pushed to read English based contents to make their brain get used to the language little by little.

Teaching isn’t an easy task to do and not everyone can do it even if they are knowledgeable. Moreover, teaching English can be a struggle in Indonesia as an EFL country but it would be easy if teachers could find the perfect methods to make the students get interested in the language. Technologies these days can surely help those who are willing to perfect their ways to teach and learn. Unlike decades ago where you have to pull out thousands of books and find the materials correctly and independently, with the help of technologies such as websites, applications, educational videos, online journals, and news which are all accessible to public use, we can find any sort of informative and educative contents that suit our needs very easily.

The issue that we face in this global pandemic situation is that students are not able to study and learn maximally particularly from school subjects. Since English in Indonesia is mostly held by official associations and school, the materials given are not fully absorbed by them since it is not held face-to-face. Students aren’t able to encounter activities such as group discussion, question and answer, storytelling, quizzes, games, etc. that originally are meant to be person-to-person learning methods. But besides that, teachers are obligated to find the best solutions out of every case possible, and in this case, teachers can use technologies to help out those perfecting English learning. Using the help of websites and applications that are available such as Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and many similar others alongside motivation given to the students can boost up their interests, and therefore they will be able to study English more excellently.

During my study in the 4th semester, we were taught to make a scenario where we teach English to young learners with the circumstances where young learners tend to be active, have a short attention span, and mostly understand the subject through playing games, etc.. I managed to put up a game through Zoom room where they can come up with ideas to make sentences out of single word I gave to them, then using Padlet–a platform that lets you and your students post a wall like Tumblr posts and all people in the made-up circle can drop comments down the wall posted–I made them type their answers and correct them afterward. This can be one of the solutions for the teachers to keep teaching English even during the global pandemic era.

Abyana Maheswara
BINUSIAN 2022
English Literature
Aternative/Combined Track 2020
2201799890