ACCELERATE NON-ENGLISH LECTURERS’ MASTERY OF ENGLISH THROUGH CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION

The articles aims of discussing about using content based approach in accelerating non-English lecturers’ mastery of English. Out of three main types of Content-Based Instruction, this study uses the theme-based language instruction to accelerate the non-English lecturers’ mastery of English. Therefore, the question was asked; can the content based approach accelerate the non-English lecturers’ mastery of English. This study was an action research study, where pre-test and posttest were administered to obtain the data, in addition to observation and literature study. The study is conducted in two cycles; each cycle consists of 5 meetings. The indicator of the study is that the study is completed when 75% of the lecturers were able to reach at least 75 points in the test. The pretest reveals that the average lecturers’ score is 63.50 and following the treatment using this approach at the end of the second cycle, the average lecturers’ mastery is 80.2%. Therefore, it is concluded that content-based instruction can accelerate the non-English lecturers’ mastery of English.


A. INTRODUCTION
ontent-based instruction (henceforth will be called as CBI) is one of approaches in teaching language as part of the communication process. There are various definitions of CBI has many definitions proposed by various scholars such as: Brinton, Snow, andWesche (2003 as cited in Ameri andFatemi, 2014) who defined it as a way of teaching that merge language teaching objectives with certain content. This definition is also resounded in Leaver and Stryker (1989 as cited in Amiri and Fatemi, 2014) who write that CBI is an instructional approach where language competencies are achieved through changing the focus of learning the language to learning the topic. It focuses on the usage of the language rather than the talking about the language (Saeidi and Farshchi, 2015).
Content-based instruction was intended to provide students with increased motivation in subject matter as well as opportunities to experience larger discourse-level features and social interaction patterns essential to language use (Lee, Quinn and Valdes (2013). This also argued by Donna M Brinton (2012), she said CBI prepares students to more complex challenges of language learning in real world, and to engage students in meaningful and broader ways of learning the language to be able to transfer the language skills and content to real life. CBI can increase learners' critical thinking and leads them to learning the language faster and more C Volume 5, Number 02, December 2019 351 enjoyably, in addition to improvement of cognitive and academic achievements in language proficiency (Stroller, 2002;Kessler and Quinn, 1987).
English mastery is as the aim of teaching English as foreign language (TEFL) encourage both lecturers and students to be able to use English in every of their activities, either in academic or non-academic activities. The necessity of English mastery is caused by the globalization. It has brought changes in education which the demand of qualified lecturers and students are increasing. One of the indicators of qualified lecturers is mastering any foreign languages, mainly English. In Indonesia, lecturers are expected to perform their best in three main area, teaching and learning, research, and community outreach. In order to do these, in addition to their own core competencies, lecturers are expected to have at least good command in English.
As most of these up to date academic references are now written in English, English mastery becomes even more necessary. There are various courses available for lecturers; however, finding time amidst their busy teaching schedule is an issue. Also, some have experienced that English courses do not significantly lasting influence on their skill improvement of this language.
Many of the available courses are not tailored to their needs or that they cannot choose what they wanted to learn in the span of a course cycle.
It is a common phenomenon for lecturers, especially those with non-English background, to for instance, ask for translation services to translate their journals in order to be published in internationally accredited journals and publishers. There is nothing wrong with this; however, it is often found that not all translation services are able to translate the intended purpose of the original author into the target language. Even, some lecturers have become prey to the predatory journals.
However, the researchers have been investigated the implementation CBI approach in teaching English, but the focus of this research was different. This research focused on the participant of non-English lecturers in Islamic higher education. It was investigated non-English lecturers competence in mastering English. Therefore, the research question was formulated in; can content based instruction accelerate the non-English lecturers' mastery in English. The objective of research was described the acceleration of non-English lecturers' mastery in English when the content based instruction was implemented.

B. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
CBI is common approach in teaching and learning language, especially English teaching. (2014) investigated the content based instruction to improve students' reading comprehension. They identified that the approach can improve the students' reading comprehension, after applying the approach in classroom action research.

Hedyan Putra and Lenny Marzulina
Windhy Eka Nuraini (2017) observed the implementation of CBI approach in teaching English at elementary school. She found that CBI approach is interested either for teacher or students.
Because, she used qualitative descriptive, thus she described the implementation of CBI approach in the classroom, such as how many percentage of teacher's talk which delivered in English. She also found that the students were easy to understand the lesson, because the teacher used Content Based Instruction (CBI).
Content-based instruction (henceforth will be called as CBI) is one of approaches in teaching language as part of the communication process. There are various definitions of CBI has many definitions proposed by various scholars such as: Brinton, Snow, and Wesche (2003 as cited in Ameri and Fatemi, 2014) who defined it as a way of teaching that merge language teaching objectives with certain content. This definition is also resounded in Leaver and Stryker (1989 as cited in Amiri and Fatemi, 2014) who write that CBI is an instructional approach where language competencies are achieved through changing the focus of learning the language to learning the topic. It focuses on the usage of the language rather than the talking about the language (Saeidi and Farshchi, 2015).
Content-based instruction was intended to provide students with increased motivation in subject matter as well as opportunities to experience larger discourse-level features and social interaction patterns essential to language use (Lee, Quinn and Valdes (2013). This also argued by Donna M Brinton (2012), she said CBI prepares students to more complex challenges of language learning in real world, and to engage students in meaningful and broader ways of learning the language to be able to transfer the language skills and content to real life. CBI can increase learners' critical thinking and leads them to learning the language faster and more enjoyably, in addition to improvement of cognitive and academic achievements in language proficiency (Stroller, 2002;Kessler and Quinn, 1987).

C. METHOD
This study is a classroom action research (CAR) as it serves the purpose of the study to accelerate the mastery of non-English lecturers' mastery in English. Bogdan & Biklen (1992, as cited in Khasinah, 2013) explain that action research is a systematic collection of information The data in this study are collected using pre-test and post-test with The Nelson Test of Achievement Form 050 C as its instrument adapted from Amiri and Fatemi (2014). This test was developed by Fowler and Coe back in 1976 and has been widely used to test general proficiency in English. Additional data are also collected using observation and documents study.
The research is conducted in two cycles, where each cycle consists of 5 meetings.
Research subjects were asked to discuss, read, and present topics related to the themes of each cycles. At end of each cycle, lecturers' achievement is measured using the test. The indicator in this study is that the research will only be completed when 75% of the participants have reached the score of at least 75 in this Nelson Test.

FINDINGS
As this study is conducted at the faculty of education sciences whose lecturers are mostly holds master degree in education sciences and within the Islamic university. The theme of these two cycles revolve around education and Islamic world. The is listed in Table 1 below   Table 1. Theme discussed in two cycles of research

Cycle 2 Leadership in Islamic world
In each of these theme, the participants are presented with several topics regarding to the theme. And then they discussed and present their ideas the related theme.

Preliminary Study
The Nelson Test of Achievement form 050 c is used in this study. This test is used as its reliability and validity have been tested and due to the time limitation on this study the researchers have no time to develop a test on their own. Hence, a readymade test is used. The results of the pre-test is presented in Table 2 below. Out of 10 lecturers only one lecturer who got 70 score, one lecturer who got 50 score and the rest range around 60.

The first cycle.
In this first cycle, the participants are presented with one article related to the topic on education in Islamic world. They read it out loud, they discuss the idea of education in Islamic  Regardless to this slight improvement, as shown in the average score above. This result is yet to meet the standard achievement set as the indicator of this study. Therefore, this study is carried out to the next cycle with slight improvement in the preparation stage, where participants are given time in advance to read the materials regarding the theme of Leadership in Islamic world.

Cycle II
As it has been mentioned above that during the preparation stage, the materials for the Leadership in Islamic world are given in advance for the participants to read and understand the text. During the meeting, participants were given time to asks questions on the world that may not familiar to them. In addition, they also prepare similar materials on other leader figures in Islamic world. Each of the participant present their own figure at the end of the meeting.
Following the presentation of the leader figure, participants write down their review of the leader and discusses it with the class. At the end of the cycle, the participants were given a posttest from the Nelson test of achievement. The result is presented in the following As it is seen in the table above, the average score has reached 80.2. Considering that the indicator for the completion of this study is that 75% of the participants have reached the score of at least 75, then this study is concluded.

Discussion
As seen in the findings above, the theme-based instruction is able to increase the participants' knowledge from the average of 63.5 to 80.2 at the end of the second cycle. This result is also backed up by Lathufirdaush (2014) where she found that theme-based instruction was also able to increase the students' speaking ability in an elementary school in Bandung.
Similar result is also found by Amiri and Fatemi (2014) where they found that CBI significantly increases the students' achievement compared to grammar translation method (GTM). Their findings also echoed several experts findings in which they agreed that content based instruction have some benefits like fostering academic growth while at the same time develop language proficiency and that the learners achieve more when emphasis is more on the meaningful and relevant content than the form of language being taugt (Crandal, 1993;Short, 1997;Snow, 1998;Stroller, 2004;Curtain 1995;Met, 1991, as cited in Amiri and Fatemi, 20145).
However, as the participants of this study have homogenous background as lecturers of education sciences and that the theme being chosen in this study are both about themes that are closer to them, it may have different result when the theme is something that are totally different from the ones that they are familiar with. In addition, since the instrument of the study is the Nelson Proficiency Test which are mostly pronouns, it may not be overly sufficient to show the advantage of using this content-based instruction compared to other approaches in language.
Another instruments are needed in order to create a broader generalization on the advantage of using this Content-Based Instruction in accelerating the English mastery of non-English lecturers at IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo. In addition, it may also be interesting to see whether the non-education related theme will bring about similar results on the ability of this approach to accelerate the participants' English mastery.
Regardless, as the original purposes of this study is as the lesson learned. It can be sufficiently claimed that Content based-instruction can be used to accelerate the English mastery of non-English lecturers in this study by using the themes that are closer to these lecturers.
This present study implies that in order to increase the non-English lecturers' mastery of English using the theme-based instruction, the themes that are closer to the participants will be able to better accelerate their language mastery. However, this claim needs to be verified in a later study. This result also implies that as a lesson learned if we want to accelerate the language Volume 5, Number 02, December 2019 357 mastery of the non-English language students using this CBI syllabus or approach, using themes that are closer to the participants may be more beneficial in increasing their language mastery

E. CONCLUSION
This study has proven that content-based instruction, specifically the theme-based instruction can be used to increase the English mastery of the non-English lecturers at IAIN SAG. This finding by some extent can be used as a lesson learned for the massive English education for non-English students in Islamic University in order to internationalize the education at the Islamic universities in Indonesia.