Religious and multi-cultural values: congruent extension of character-based english education

Religious and multi-cultural values: congruent extension of character-based english education The curriculum amendment of 2013 has brought about the adjustment to some levels of Indonesian educational aspects. Likewise, English subject in the seventh grade of junior school might be affected in some areas, say, students’ textbook as learning materials and teaching-learning activities. “When English Rings the Bell” aimed by the curriculum to provide the seventh graders with a series of learning materials probably contains religious and (socially) cultural knowledge to let them attain the religious and (socially) cultural behaviors as their first and second important competencies, in turn, indicating the character education in Indonesia. The matter of presentation of the religious and socially cultural information of the textbook was, to some extent, problematical challenge from the discourse insights as the discourse contents of the textbook had to fit the students’ novel knowledge to learn English as initially compulsory subject at this school level. The discourse representation of the “what” and “how” of the religious and cultural information in the textbook to communicate religious and multi-cultural values to be integrated with teachers’ teaching-learning activities became the two focuses of this current study. Within the elaboration of the discourse tools of vocabulary and reflexive context, and anthropological category tools of religiousness and culture, the researcher was going to scrutinize the presence of vocabulary of the English and Indonesian and images to depict the religious and multi-cultural information as knowledge to carry the character values in the the textbook. The words and images served as data, and units of analysis are vocabularies/words as linguistic units and culturally objective or physical or symbolic signs of images as non-linguistic units. The researcher also possibly reviewed several semiotic and material development theories to discuss and generalize the findings. Besides, the researcher applied secondary research instrument of teachers’ interview of the implementation of religious and multi-cultural values into teaching and learning activities elaborated to sound the character education. The research worked as confirmatory research product to validate the discourse, anthropological, semiotic and material development insights. It might also be informative topical preference of diversity (religiousness and Indonesian multi-culture) to indicate the presence of pedagogical discourse sample to contribute to the carrying-out of the curriculum to symbolize the character education, resourceful guidance for those engaged with textbook selection and design, and be a character education model for those dealing with teaching-learning tasks and the textbook integration to help their students gain religious and multi-cultural competencies