Introducing Intercultural Character Model (ICM): A Literature Based-Character Education in Increasing Intercultural Understanding for Indonesian Learners of English

Abstract

The 2013 curriculum of Indonesia recommends that education processes should be able to provide a learning environment which not only develops students’ intelligence and skills, but also forms their good character including English education. One way to bring character education into the English language pedagogy is to provide character learning derived from English literature. This study aims to examine the use of English literature for developing the good character of Indonesian learners of English. Descriptive method with inquiry based questioners is used to undertake this study. 78 students are randomly selected and participate to give the data required for this study. The results reveal two things. The first, all students find the English literature useful to recognize the culture of the target language and to know the intercultural character. The second, three good characters are found in English literature, i.e. heroic, honest and truth characters, which are here known as the intercultural characters model (ICM). The findings should be used as convincing reasons by English teachers to prove the positive effect of using literature not only for teaching English, but also for developing the learners’ good characters.