Developing local wisdom content as ideal ELT materials for Indonesia in globalization era

Abstract

Realizing that English is an international language, many of us have been oriented that all English teaching materials would be of foreign-culture content basis and overseas topics. Such phenomenon seems to neglect (rich) domestic issues that may result in the occupation of foreign cultures of most of Indonesia learners’ attitudes. Consequently, they seem unresponsive to their social cultures in spite of their knowledge of foreign cultures, ending up in some social sentiment perspectives to English as an important subject in this era. This situation may contradict with the national objectives of education emphasizing on developing national-cultural identity and the national character building along with the need to attain competitive power of human resources for the nation.This paper explores and proposes an ideal English language teaching (ELT) material and resources by which local wisdoms based content is integrated in the ELT materials. This attempt follows the national objectives of education. This paper also discusses how teachers could manage their teaching of such locally-rich materials and resources into an attractive teaching-learning management and ICT based media