We all agree that it is very important to teach about Indonesian culture as well as language, but we never seem to be sure about how to do it. In the past we had reading passages about Borobudur, Keris, Tarian Bali, Ken Arok etc, but students found them rather boring. They were boring. They lacked linguistic interest. And now we have also moved much further away from Reading as a core activity, with much more emphasis on Speaking and Listening. We do not have the time any longer to teach about culture through such topics.

We need to find the culture IN the language. We all believe that the culture is in the language but we have not yet developed a systematic way of showing that culture. but I think that together we can work out lists of cultural aspects that can be easily found in the language, and that can be fairly simply included in language teaching. Forms of address can be linked to deference, respect and the concept of the family (and extended into politics). The teaching of the meaning of names is highly interesting, but also never taught. We can do a lot with people's names and the names of cities and their acronyms. Body language is important too. More can be done to teach obliqueness. Proverbs should be reintegrated for the higher levels. This paper will discuss some names, some acronyms, body language and proverbs, as a start on finding ways to draw culture of out language, and stop trying to putting culture in to the language.

Biodata:

Associate Professor David Reeve
Department of Chinese and Indonesian,
School of Modern Language Studies,
University of New South Wales,
Sydney 2052 Australia
telephone + 61 2 9385 1019
fax + 61 2 9385 1090
email d.reeve@unsw.edu.au

tel  +62 361 225243 / 221782 / 221783 fax  +62 361 263509 kipbipa@ialfbali.co.id www.ialf.edu/kipbipa/