Exploring Cultural Inclusion in the Curriculum and Practices for Teaching Bahasa Indonesia to Speakers of Other Languages

Abstract

This study explores implementations for teaching Bahasa Indonesia (BI) and the process for including culture when teaching BI to speakers of other languages (BIPA). In this research, content analysis was applied, and a qualitative approach was used to analyze the data, which were obtained from the BIPA websites of 11 universities and one BIPA website hosted by Indonesia’s Ministry of Education and Culture. This study also recruited 36 people as participants. Analysis of the data through content analysis comprised six steps: i) transforming the data into narrative text, ii) determining units of analysis in line with the research questions, iii) developing rules for the data-coding system, iv) applying the coding to all units of analysis, v) testing the consistency of each coding, and vi) drawing conclusions about the verified data. The results show how the implementations of BIPA in practice conform to curriculum planning, and they identify objectives, determine teaching materials, provide a learning experience, and evaluate the results. In these four aspects, the results are appropriate, but undesirable properties were identified in terms of the length of the study, an absence of vocabulary items, and learning outcomes for BIPA for specific academic purposes. For cultural aspects, Indonesian culture was found to be included in various topics and learning experiences, but soft diplomacy was not effectively taught through the language-teaching content and methodology.