Let's Bring English Learning Back to Its Fun Nature

I started this writing on a Thursday night after an evening class. This thought is a result of a long reflection toward my current occupation and my current class performance. When I write this article, Indonesia is breaking another record of Covid-19 positive cases. Because of this condition, people are forced to work from home (again) and face even stricter measure to decrease the infections. We would think that as people work from home, the amount of stress goes down and we become more productive. On some level, yes, on another? With constant exposure to bad news on social media and the pressure of work, I don't think more time working from home change a lot of things.

I wonder about these pressures and how some people think about English learning. I did a little survey and asked around whether learning English considered as a choice of activity to lessen people's anxiety during the pandemic. Unfortunately no, learning English is pushed to the end of the list even before Delta Variant hits Indonesia. I did some more digging on other English learning platforms out there, I scoured Tiktoks, Reels, and Twitter to see what other teachers bring to this 21 century learning method (a.k.a virtual learning era).

Let me give you some of my personal contexts. When I took Cambridge certification, the whole course was set to groom teachers in the offline setting; How to create clarifying questions, peer-feedback environment, and one thing that I still have difficulty doing in online setting — correcting students' pronunciation. These are some teaching methods easier to do in front of the class. Then, the whole thing becomes a thousand time more challenging when I know that all learning platforms moved online only a couple of months after I received my teaching certificate. All in all, as a new teacher, I was super unprepared for online teaching.

I look for references, other online courses, direction on how to navigate during this uncertain time: it was abundant. However, when I see how courses are shaped, a thought sparked in me: These courses, these sources, they made English seemed so tedious. How is it that after so many years, the goals of learning English is still too focused on its accuracy? How is it, in Indonesia, we are still building stigma that if we can't speak accurate English, it is better not to speak at all.

Don't get me wrong, being accurate in our language is one of the learning aims. Especially for teacher/advanced academic student like me, being accurate is on top of priority. But I myself didn't start by being accurate. I learn English at first because I was curious, I departed from knowing there are other languages than the ones spoken by my family. I didn't start with knowing all the 16 grammars, I started because learning English is fun and it opens many closed windows; I was enlighten to the outside world, to the many worlds because of this language. This before my teacher once punished me after I mixed has and had on a present/past perfect tense exam. This before many people mockingly commented on other people's English mistakes on social media. This before the fear of making mistakes overwhelmed my yearning for the joy of learning.