Does Curriculum Help Students to Develop Their English Competence? A Case in Indonesia

To sustain its future competitive employment both at national and international level, Indonesia Government needs to invest more in its human resources. Therefore, education is the critical aspect to prepare highly educated and well-trained human resources for an innovation driven global competitiveness. In education, when curriculum fails to provide sufficient skills and competence for learners, human resources will not likely to move up to higher development level. This article aims at exploring the issues and challenges encountered by Indonesia government in improving the most crucial aspect needed for global competitiveness that is English communication competence. English communication level of Indonesian learners is considered low and satisfactory. Since Indonesian students obtain English from schools and classroom teaching, curriculum objectives should help them achieving the target of learning. However, there are three major issues found in Indonesia curriculum: top-down approach, the absence of Needs Analysis (NA) studies, and no curriculum evaluation. In nutshell, those three factors are suspected to contribute the underdeveloped English communication competences of Indonesian learners. In view of this, Indonesian can learn from other countries that have succeeded in reforming and developing English curriculum while taking into account the uniqueness of its own context.