The Curricular and Extra-Curricular System of TEFL: a Case Study at Pondok Modern Gontor Indonesia

Pondok Modern is one of Islamic educational institutions in Indonesia which is, with its boarding school system, well-known for its success in bringing-up its students to have basic communicative ability in two foreign languages, Arabic and English. Its fame tempts the writer to reveal some of its secrets. This paper tries to focus on describing the system of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL), including curricular and extra-curricular activities. The discussion of curricular syllabus unfolds the materials, techniques and evaluation system of all English subjects: English, Reading, Grammar, and Composition. The extra-class activities cover language movement, English speech training, wall magazine publication, and English extensive courses.This is a case study taking teachers and students of Pondok Modern as subjects. The data were collected by documentation, observation, and interview; and analyzed using qualitative description. The results show that both the curricular and extra-curricular activities require that the learners not only actively produce the target language since early stage of learning but also be involved in authentic communication. The teaching of Grammar terminologies is intended not for the sake of improving explicit knowledge but to provide more chance to practice constructing sentences. It can be inferred, then, that this frequent use of the target language represents the main contributive factors to the success of the English teaching and learning efforts.