Background of the Study

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This chapter is arranged into 6 sections. The first section presents the background of the study from general issues into factual and specified cases in the Budi Utama Multilingual School in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The second section provides statements of the problem and is followed by the purpose of the study in section three. The fourth section is about the research questions. The fifth section describes the significance of the study and the last section provides the definition of terms.

1.1. Background of the Study

Presently, Mandarin Chinese is an increasingly popular language to learn around the world and it has the largest number of people who speak it as their first language.

Saville-troike (2006) noted that the four most commonly used languages in the world are Chinese, English, Spanish, and Hindi. Further she said that these four major languages has been acquired by over 2 billion as the first languages (L1) and about 1.7 billion as the second language (L2). Walsh (2006, p.1) in his article says, “School

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adding Chinese classes: Educators push for lessons, citing Chinese influence.” The article further explains that the awakening of mainland China as a powerful economy motivates people to learn Mandarin Chinese.

In Indonesia, there were more than 620 Mandarin schools between 1965 and 1966. However, due to the political problems, most of those schools were forced to close in 1967 (Wen, 1997, p.1). After reformation began in 1998 under President Abdurrahman Wahid (also known as Gus Dur), a new policy was implemented that would improve the status of Chinese-Indonesians by allowing them to acquire Chinese names and learn/speak Mandarin Chinese.

According to a research conducted by the Language Centre under the Ministry of Education in Indonesia (2003, pp.100-109), 53.33% of Chinese-Indonesians in Jakarta use Indonesian as their first language compared to 26.66% of those who use Mandarin Chinese as their mother tongue. This data illustrates that there is a very low retention rate of Mandarin Chinese among Chinese-Indonesians. Despite these statistics, 86.6% of Chinese-Indonesian parents strongly wish for their children to learn Mandarin Chinese at school.

In early 2000, a number of private multilingual schools were established in Indonesia. Budi Utama is one of these multilingual schools where three languages

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(Indonesian, English, and Mandarin) are used daily as the languages of instruction.

Established in 2007, this is the only multi-language school in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The school adopts the national curriculum (2013) and implements Mandarin Chinese as the local content, which is defined by Drost (2000, p.7) as supplementary teaching materials that allow students to enjoy their time at school, usually taking the form of foreign languages or arts.

Mandarin Chinese is taught in Budi Utama Multilingual School from Kindergarten to Secondary school. This school consists of both local Mandarin Chinese teachers and native speakers. Presently, grade 7 is the highest level in that school. The school uses a Chinese Language textbook (小学华文) from Singapore for teaching primary school students. The students from Grade 5 who participate in this research have high competence in both pronunciation and speaking. According to the interview with one of the local teachers, some of the students have already achieved level 3 on the Youth Chinese Test (YCT). The school supports the students to take this Chinese proficiency test which is an internationally standardized test

launched by Hanban in Mainland China. YCT is directed at examining non-native primary and secondary school students’ capability in applying Chinese language in

their studies, personal lives, and work. The students also plan to take the YCT to get

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to level 4. This would mean that the students already have acquired more than 300 words and characters in their vocabulary (Hanban, 2010). They have already learnt about school and friends in the previous level. Furthermore, these students enjoy activities and have received medals from a number of national competitions in Mandarin Chinese in Indonesia. Yet, they still have some difficulties in dictation and writing Chinese characters, particularly because these students have been accustomed to writing in pinyin. These students may attempt to apply techniques used when they were brought up learning the Indonesian language, which is written using the Latin alphabet. Therefore, students find it difficult to write Chinese characters (Cook, 2003; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; Jiang, 2008). The use of technology to enhance language learning, especially in writing Chinese characters (Zhao, 2003) can potentially improve their ability.

Using technology is not a brand new method for students a Budi Utama Multilingual School. Based on the preliminary survey, 5th grade students at that school stated that they have a PC computer at home, a laptop, tablet, and/or smart phone. The school also provides a computer class of two period a week (total 80 minutes). However, the technology has not been integrated in supporting their Chinese Mandarin language learning. Therefore, many students rely on Google

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translate to help them complete their homework assignments.

Besides the technology in learning languages, that has been mentioned in the above paragraph, the school and the students do not know about the computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Most of the teaching and learning process is text-based or teacher-centered rather than interaction or communication-based (Kukulska-Hulme & Shield, 2008). This recent situation does not parallel into some trends during the period of 2012-2017. According to New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report (2012) the workplace is increasingly collaborative, which subsequently leads to changes in the way student projects are structured. Moreover, the abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via internet is increasingly challenging us to constantly refocus on our roles as educators. Therefore, the education paradigms are shifting to include online learning and collaborative models. As a result of these conditions above, there consequently will be a new emphasis on more challenge-based and active learning in classrooms.

About comics as learning activity, a research work done by Clark (2000) shows that comics have positive effects on students. Comics engage attention and serves as entertainment; moreover, it presents information in a non-threatening manner. Doring (2002) adds that comics can also be used as stimuli to encourage thinking and

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discussion skills. Other research by Rule and Auge (2005) shows that students who learn using comics achieve higher test scores and can provide examples of why they enjoy learning in this manner. By using comics, the students engage themselves in self-motivated practice.

In some learning activities, working together in groups can help the students to study freely while simultaneously achieving more competences. Working with friends requires collaboration in order to accomplish some tasks that can be done in a short time rather than working individually. Therefore, the introduction of

collaborative learning in CSCL, such as creating comics, is necessary for students. In the future, some other activities can be applied to support the students’ learning in

Mandarin Chinese.