English as a Medium of Instruction in the International Laboratory Primary School of Universitas Negeri Malang (UM)

English plays an important role as a medium of communication in the globalization era. Considering the importance of English, Indonesian government issued the decree no 20/2003 about the establishment of international standard schools in every level of education. It aims to create quality Indonesian human resources who are able to compete and collaborate globally so that Indonesia can compete with other countries. As the attainment of the decree, nowadays there are many international standard schools from primary until high school level.English in international standard primary school is used as a medium of instruction. The teachers are expected to be able to teach all the subjects in English which is neither the students’ first language nor the teachers’. Teaching using English is especially more difficult if the students are children of the first grade of primary school who have no English background knowledge at all. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the use of English as a medium of instruction in the first grade of international standard primary school. This study was conducted to describe the use of English as a medium of instruction in the first grade of the International Laboratory Primary School of Universitas Negeri Malang (UM). The study specifically investigated the frequency of the teacher in using English as a medium of instruction, the purpose of the teacher uses English in her/his instruction, and the strategies the teacher does to make her/his talk understandable. This study applied descriptive design. The subject of the study was one of the teachers of the first grade of the International Laboratory Primary School of Universitas Negeri Malang (UM). The instruments used to collect the data were observation forms, interview guide, and field notes. The data taken from those instruments were analyzed and described, focusing on the frequency, the purpose, and the strategies.This study found out that the use of English as a medium of instruction in the first grade class being observed reached about 88% of the total amount of the utterances spoken by the teacher. She used English for almost all of purposes. She used it to greet the students, instruct, discipline, present the material, ask and give information, check students’ comprehension, give feedback, and praise the students. She only used Indonesian (L1) in some special conditions that urged her to do so to gain the purpose of the talk and the goal of the lesson: to convey the moral of the lesson, to give feedback to noisy students, to translate the meaning of the target language when she had no other way to make the students understand her talk, to recheck and clarify students’ understanding, and to do private talk with the students. To provide comprehensible input in making the students understand her talk, she did some linguistic and interactional adjustments. In linguistic adjustments, the teacher used slower rate of speech, exaggerated intonation and stress, basic and frequent vocabulary, more proper nouns, more definite pronouns, more pauses, short sentences, and ungrammatical sentences. While in interactional adjustments, the teacher did a lot of comprehension check, a lot of repetitions and paraphrasing. She also made use of gestures, pictures, direct translation, and direct answer.Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the use of English as a medium of instruction in the first grade of the International Laboratory Primary School of Universitas Negeri Malang (UM) was very well established. However, it is suggested for the teacher to explore more of her ability in using body language, gestures and facial expression to attract and engage the students’ attention. Moreover, it is also beneficial for the teacher to use more of concrete referents such as props, realia, and manipulatives to help the students understand her talk better. Those two things can make talk more comprehensible