In 2013, the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture published the 2013 Curriculum which demands teachers to implement authentic assessment as the method of assessing the students’ competence. There were three areas of students’ competence that should be assessed by authentic assessments, namely attitudes, knowledge, and skills. The types of authentic assessment that could be used to assess students’ skills are performance, project, and portfolio. This study aims at describing the implementation of authentic assessment to measure students’ English productive skills based on 2013 Curriculum at the eighth grade of a pilot school--State Junior High School 1 Ungaran (SJHS1U) in the academic year 2015/2016, explaining the problems the teachers encountered in implementing it, and explaining the solution used by the teachers to overcome those problems. The data were collected through interviews, class and document observations, were validated by triangulation of sources and analysed by using the flow model of Miles and Hubberman (1984). The results of the study revealed that the English teachers of the school have implemented the authentic assessment to measure students’ English productive skills. In doing so, the teachers asked the students to describe picture cues and retell the story as the performance assessments, to write a text for the portfolio assessment and to produce a comic for the project assessment. However, the implementation has not been conducted properly yet.

Although studies on the development of higher order thinking skills (HOTS) as part of Bloom’s revised taxonomy have grown significantly among adult learners, little is known about its use for teaching English to young learners. In the Indonesian context, HOTS is mandated by the scientific-based 2013 national curriculum. This study investigates the development of HOTS strategies and possible challenges through storytelling among seventh grade students to improve their speaking ability. This Classroom Action Research (CAR) obtains data from classroom observations, interviews with the teachers and students, and analysis of lesson plans. The findings reveal that, in its simple form, HOTS in storytelling was developed in young English learners through open-ended question, a strategy which enables students to practice speaking through giving opinion, comment, and imagination while analyzing and evaluating the story. However, due to their limited language competence and unfamiliarity with the story context, students still find difficulties in creating their own stories, the highest level of educational objective. The study finally comes up with ways to engage students in storytelling while developing their HOTS.

This paper presents the result of a survey on the usefulness of an ICT-based software program called DEC (a pseudonym for a particular commercial English learning resource). This program was utilized by English Departement University of PGRI Semarang as a complementary software in Integrated Course offered to the first semester students. The research adopted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Davis (1989) which focused on the perceived acceptability of the program. An online questionaire was used to get the data. 236 students participated in the survey. The collected data were tabulated and interpreted descriptively. The findings show various results from the questionnaire under the 4 headings: perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived attitude towards usage, and perceived intentional behavior to use.

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) has been widely recognized as a set of important devices of cognitive development. The research was conducted to evaluate the availability of higher order thinking skills in reading comprehension questions of the English textbook for Year X of high school published by ministry of education. There are 158 reading comprehension questions from 15 reading texts which are analyzed using revised Bloom’s taxonomy. An intuitive approach to the analysis of qualitative data is taken for the study in which an individual researcher intuitively relates data from various instruments to each other (Smaling, 1987) in Meijer, et al (2002, p. 146). The data were analyzed qualitatively to determine the cognitive level of each questions according to revised Bloom’s taxonomy, Question types based on which cognitive process is required to answer and forms of questions. The result shows that majority of reading comprehension questions in the textbook being studied is in the lowest level of revised Bloom’s taxonomy; remembering with 134 items whereas higher order thinking skills are only found in 24 out of 158 items. It was concluded that the reading comprehension questions of the English textbook for Year X of high school is lack of higher order thinking skills. The result of the study is expected to benefit the English teachers, textbook writers and further researchers to elaborate the implementation of higher order thinking skills in English teaching and learning.

The success of lesson study as an approach for teacher professional development in improving students’ learning has inspired the works on microteaching lesson study which is designed for student teachers in microteaching course. Some studies show that microteaching lesson study brought about positive result to student teachers’ pedagogical ability and content knowledge. However, that microteaching lesson study influences student teachers in their teaching internship, that is the course taken after microteaching where student teachers teach real students in real schools, has not been revealed yet. This study aims at exploring the influence of microteaching lesson study on the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student teachers in teaching internship and to what extent the influence was to promote the EFL student teachers’ life-long learning to teach. It is a qualitative study with semi-structured group interview as the instrument of the research. The subject of the study was ten EFL student teachers who voluntarily participated in the study from twenty two student teachers. They had enrolled in a microteaching class that applied microteaching lesson study in the sixth semester and then took the teaching internship in the seventh semester. The finding of the study indicates that microteaching lesson study has considerably influences most of the EFL student teachers in gaining life-long learning to teach as they already implemented the steps of microteaching lesson study in their teaching internship initiatively. Finally, this study recommends teacher educators to adapt lesson study in microteaching course that can make the EFL student teachers to keep learning to teach.

This article is based on the study on the model written texts provided in the Senior High School English textbooks. It is aimed at finding out whether those models are written by considering the English two contexts, cultural and situational, which encircle them. The data are all written texts provided in the six recommended English textbooks published by six different publishers. The results reveal that only eleven out of 115 model written texts tend to be incompatible with the two contexts encircling them, this implies that 104 of them (93.43%) are likely to be compatible and can be usedas model texts.

Technology integration has been acknowledged to support instructional activities in and outside classrooms. In English instruction context, previous researchers revealed that technology use contributes to the enhancement and longer retention of students' learning. This study is aimed at exploring kinds of technology to facilitate learning and evaluating how teachers integrate the technology into English instructions. Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition (SAMR) model by Puentedura (2006, 2013) was used as the framework to evaluate technology integration. Two English teachers of senior high schools in Central Java, Indonesia and their respected students were involved in this study. Classroom observation, interview, questionnaire, and document review were used to obtain the research data. This case study employed Thematic Analysis by Braun and Clarke (2006) as the data analysis method. The findings show that the teachers and students have utilized various types of technology and its integration has undergone four levels of Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.

In the teaching and learning process, assessment is considered a critical component of curriculum design to determine whether the goals of education have been achieved. In fact, many teachers still have difficulties to design a suitable assessment instrument. To complicate the matter, it should align with the teaching and learning objectives of the 2013 curriculum which requires the teacher to foster the students' critical and creative thinking. This study aimed to explain the development of discovery-based speaking assessments to stimulate students' critical thinking and creativity at the tenth graders of MIPA 3 at SMA Sultan Agung 1 Semarang in the academic year of 2017/2018. Research and Development (R&D) was applied in this study. This study utilized quantitative and qualitative data through the questionnaire, interview, observation, and test as the instrument in collecting the data. The teacher collaborated with the researcher in developing the discovery-based speaking assessments module. After that, the module was revised based on the experts’ suggestions before conducting the main field testing. The result of the study showed that there were improvements in the students' score after they were taught using discovery-based speaking assessments module. A paired sampled test result yield that there were significant improvements in the students’ mean score in the post-test compared to their pre-test. The significant improvements indicated that discovery-based speaking assessments were effective to improve the students' speaking skill, critical thinking, and creativity.