Language Teaching in Vocational Higher Education Based on Industry Needs

Abstract

The globalization era and also the implementation of Asian Free Trade, make Indonesia face the influx of goods & services frorm Asian countries, and also from other countries as well. Moreover, foreign human resources working in Indonesia will be incrasing. This will cause the competition of getting jobs in Indonesia for Indonesian higher education graduates becoming tighter and tighter, since they have to compete with the graduates form other countries who look for jobs in Indonesia. Therefore, the quality of the education in Indonesia should be improved. This includes Polytechnic as Vocational Tertiary Education in Indonesia which produce graduates who are ready to work in industry. Polytechnic should provide their students to have sufficient competencies to enable them to win the job competition in their own country. They should have adequate competencies in their own field (in accordance with their majoring) and supported with the ability to communicate in English as one of international language commonly used in industries in the globalization era. The aims of the reseach is to find out the competencies for communicating in English needed by industry. The result of the reseach is very important to design the syllabus and the teaching materials eduquate for Tertiary Higher Education in Indonesia, since it produces graduates who ready to work instantly after they graduate. This study is done through Need Analysis of English competencies used in industry. The objects of this study are industries located in Central Java Provinces and Yogjakarta which are as the users of Vocational Tertiary Higher Education, such as industrries in Manufactures, banking and Financial, IT , as well as Hotel and Tourism industries. The result of the reseach shows that the four language skills or competencies needed in today industries in Indonesia consists of twenty competencies, seventeen listening competencies, fourteen reading competencies and fourteen writing competencies. However, the competencies needed varies depend on the job fields as well. The result of this study is then used to revise the curriculum and the syllabus design in Semarang State Polytechnic. Keywords— competencies, curriculum, industry needs, need analysis, syllabus