Indonesian EFL Curricula: What content knowledge demands do they make of Australian teachers?

This paper reports on the experiences of four Australian teachers who provide English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction to Indonesian secondary school students in a regional area of Central Java, Indonesia. These four teachers were all native English speakers and experienced qualified teachers, however, the Australian State Department of Education that sent them to Indonesia did not provide them with formal EFL teaching qualifications or experience. This paper theorises the teachers’ talk about their teaching work in Indonesia in an attempt to identify the forms of content knowledge they required to do their teaching. Two significant findings emerged from this research. Firstly, the teachers encountered two distinctively different EFL curricula in Indonesia: the formal EFL Indonesian National Secondary School curriculum and an informal EFL curriculum that the teachers introduced. Each of these curricula required the teachers to draw upon a different content knowledge base. The second significant finding was that these unqualified and inexperienced EFL teachers were not able to make an effective contribution to the formal EFL Indonesian National Secondary School curriculum because they were not given an opportunity to acquire the requisite content knowledge base. Such findings should be of interest to teachers and program managers involved in EFL curricula.