Think Globally, Act Locally: The Strategy of Incorporating Local Wisdom in Foreign Language Teaching in Indonesia

Indonesia is well-known for its diversity of ethnicity, language, religion and tradition. This gives birth to the emergence of local wisdom in every region in this country. Local wisdom is certainly very meaningful because it is a part of characteristic of the nation. Unfortunately, many today’s young people are not familiar, even do not know, with their local wisdoms. This should be paid more attention since local wisdom is one of the self-identity of the nation. One of strategies to preserve and inherit local wisdom is by integrating it into all lessons, including foreign language, taught at school. Local wisdom needs to be in instructional activities of foreign language teaching, even though they need to learn foreign languages, they would not lose their real identity. The application of this concept is not only to equip the students with linguistic competence but also to provide them with cultural competence. This paper discusses the importance, the reason and the practical ways of integrating local wisdom in foreign language teaching for Indonesian students. It is concluded that the integration of local wisdom is very essential and it could be executed by including the local wisdom values into the materials, allocated time for discussion on local wisdom, classroom activities and the process of teaching linguistic skill.