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REMEDIAL TEACHING PROGRAM FOR LOW-ACHIEVERS: AN EFL TEACHER’S

PERCEPTION

Article  in  ETERNAL (English Teaching Learning and Research Journal) · December 2019

DOI: 10.24252/Eternal.V52.2019.A9

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 REMEDIAL TEACHING PROGRAM FOR LOW-ACHIEVERS: AN
EFL TEACHER’S PERCEPTION
Eko Noprianto
SMA Negeri 1 Kibang, Lampung Timur
Noprianto.eko@student.upi.edu

ABSTRACT In schools like in Indonesia in which the majority of the classrooms are
dominated by students coming from various cultures, different personality, different learning
strategies, different background knowledge, and different pace in learning as well, it is
certainly difficult for the teachers to accommodate all students' needs which then results to
have students who cannot reach the learning objectives. Thus, a remedial teaching program
is demanded to address those failing students. However, the debate on whether or not
remedial teaching was effective for low-achievers continued among scholars. Besides, the
attention on remedial teaching programs in the Indonesian context was also limited. This
case study involving one EFL teacher of a Junior High School in Riau was conducted to
explore her perception of the remedial teaching programs and to find out what problems she
encountered in conducting it. Using an interview supported with document analysis, the
researcher found that although the teachers admitted that low-achievers benefited from
remedial teaching programs, it was difficult for the teacher to design and conduct an effective
remedial teaching programs mainly due to time limitation. Besides, the difficulty in
simplifying teaching materials, students’ learning overload and lack of school support were
seen to be other problems encountered by her in conducting the program.

Keywords: 2013 curriculum, low-achievers, remedial teaching program

A. INTRODUCTION

S ince teachers have the responsibility to help students become both intelligent and good,
it is such a relieving and enjoyable moment for teachers to know that their teaching works.
Failing will certainly bother both teacher and students. However, in schools in which the
majority of the classrooms are filled with students coming from various cultures, different
personality, different learning strategies, different background knowledge, and different pace in
learning as well, it is certainly difficult for the teachers to accommodate all students’ needs which
then results to have students who cannot reach the learning objectives (Lampard, 2006).
Moreover, the chance to have students who fall behind the other students might be even bigger
due to psychological problems such as lack of confidence, learning anxiety, and probably low
self-esteem involving students (Arifin, 2017), not to mention the technical aspect like the size
of the classroom, around thirty to forty students, which is obviously not ideal. Therefore,
teachers would easily find some students who reluctantly learn, have poor motivation, are
unable to comprehend learning material, have a short span of focus, and probably have other
behavioral problems. As a result, it is not surprising to find some low-achievers, those who
could not achieve learning objectives as stated in the beginning of the teaching semester or in
the context of this study, the ones who are unable to reach the Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal (KKM)

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or Minimum Achievement Criteria score, a targeted competence which should be achieved by

Indonesian students in the form of numeral values (Dirjendikdasmen, 2015).
However, burdening those students and the classroom conditions with all blames seems to
be exaggerating since there might also be problems with the way teachers deliver the teaching
material as well as problems in managing all students with those aforementioned differences.
Ironically, the fact that many teachers including EFL teachers only employ another test to deal
with low-achievers is not helping. Giving more test is not a solution since students need to
understand the concept of learning material. No matter how frequently teachers set the test, the
improvement will not probably be significant. Therefore, besides doing a reflection of what has
been done and what was probably wrong with the curricula and evaluation (Oyekan, 2013) for
future improvement, teachers need to design a teaching and learning strategy to help those low-
achievers to pass the targeted score in a short time as the assessment follow-up. As stated in
Panduan Penilaian Kurikulum 2013 or the Evaluation Guidelines of 2013 Curriculum, it is clearly
mentioned that all teachers should design a remedial teaching program which will be used to
deal with the low-achievers and an enrichment program for those who already reach the learning
objectives (Dirjendikdasmen, 2015).
However, whether or not remedial teaching program could really help low-achievers reach
the learning objectives still becomes a topic to debate among scholars. Ndebele (2014), Othman
and Shuqair (2013), and Sahito's et al. (2017), for instance, believed that the remedial teaching
was proven to be ineffective and only a few students benefitted from the program. The
ineffectiveness of the program was due to several factors such as the inadequate teaching
material and poorly trained teachers to conduct remedial teaching combined with the poor
supervision and monitoring from the stakeholders (Ndebele, 2014), students’ negative attitude
toward the program and the use of inappropriate teaching methods which kept being used by
the lectures (Othman & Shuqair, 2013), not to mention the time limitation and lack of logistical
structure (Alghamdi & Siddiqui, 2016).
Meanwhile, Selvarajan and Vasanthagumar (2012), on the other hand, found that remedial
teaching was proven to be crucial to deal with low-achievers if delivered appropriately. Their
findings were also in line with a study conducted by Jadal (2012) which compared a systematic
remedial teaching program with traditional methods in dealing with low-achievers and the study
conducted by Cheng (2014) in Taiwan context which elicited the students and instructors’
perception on remedial teaching.
However, although remedial teaching program is seen crucial in dealing with low-achievers,
the attention on remedial teaching program particularly in the context of Indonesian is still

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limited in numbers. Besides, some studies such as the ones by Alghamdi and Siddiqui (2016);
Boatman and Long (2017); Cheng (2014); Jadal (2012); Othman and Shuqair (2013); Ndebele
(2014); Sahito's et al. (2017); and Selvarajan and Vasanthagumar (2012) focused only on the
effectiveness of remedial program from students’ perspectives and seem unable to bring a deep
and comprehensive exploration regarding EFL teachers’ perception toward remedial teaching
program which is arguably essential before conducting any programs to students. This study,
on the other hand, would try to deeply investigate how an EFL teacher perceived remedial
teaching as well as to find out what problems she encountered in designing and conducting the
program. Considering all those aforementioned issues and theories, the researcher was
interested in exploring how an EFL teacher perceived remedial teaching as well as to find out
what problems she encountered in designing and conducting the program. This study would
hopefully give some meaningful contributions to the Indonesian education in relation to the
remedial teaching program implementation.

B. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Remedial teaching program
Etymologically, remedial is derived from the word ‘remedy’ which means to heal, to repair,
to fix and to repeat. Thus, remedial teaching is a process of teaching to heal and to repair the
learning results which is not in accordance with stated learning objectives to get better results
(Masbur, 2012). In more specific definition, Cheng (2014); Selvarajan and Vasanthagumar
(2012) argued that remedial teaching is conducted to provide the students who cannot keep
pace with the process of teaching and learning in normal classroom activities with the
opportunities to get them at least similar results with those who already reach the targeted score.
Inline to that definition, Cashdan and Pumfrey (2006); Jangid and Inda (2016) believe that
remedial teaching is an effort to help students who need pedagogical or didactic assistance
probably due to a certain learning or behavioral problem. In the context of Indonesia,
Dirjendikdasmen (2015) in Panduan Penilaian Kurikulum 2013 (the Evaluation Guidelines of 2013
Curriculum) mentions that remedial teaching is the help for the students who have not achieved
the Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal (KKM) score. Based on those definitions, it is clear that the
objective of remedial teaching is basically to make sure that all low-achievers are able to get the
targeted learning competencies based on their characteristics and capabilities. As highlighted by
Christenson and Thurlow (2004), remedial teaching should be designed to help students find a
match between the classroom and school activities with their individual characteristics to meet
the academics and behavior demand.

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Conducting an effective remedial teaching

In order to get a maximum result of remedial teaching, Makmun (2005) suggested seven
procedures of conducting remedial teaching: (1) diagnosing students’ learning difficulties in
which, according to Djamarah and Zain (2002), it is considered to be the most important
procedure in which the teachers could not skip because the teachers would get the pictures of
what happens to the students and the possibility of how to deal with them, (2) deciding the
actions dealing with students’ problems, (3) providing students’ with counselling if the students’
problems seem to be complicated and could not be overcome by the regular teacher, (4)
conducting remedial teaching to repair students’ achievement which is below the targeted score
(KKM), (5) measuring students’ achievement (6) Re-evaluating and re-diagnosing, and (7)
optionally, enriching.
In Indonesia’s latest curriculum, 2013 curriculum, although the procedures of conducting
remedial teaching are probably not comprehensive enough as the guidelines, it is mentioned
that remedial teaching could be conducted through four possible ways: (1) Remedial teaching
through different teaching methods and media, (2) Special treatment in which it is assigned if
only several students who could not keep pace with the majority of the students in the
classroom, (3) Assigning more special assignment to help the students get used to the types of
test questions through intensive practice and assignment, and (3) Peer tutorial
(Dirjendikdasmen, 2015).

C. METHOD
The current study is aimed at exploring a Junior High School EFL teacher’s perception in
remedial teaching programs and figuring out what problems the teacher might encounter in
conducting it. To realize the objectives of the research, a qualitative case study approach was
selected. The use of the qualitative case study in this present study is because the researcher
intended to find out an intensive and holistic description and in-depth analyses of what really
happened to remedial teaching implementation from an EFL teacher’s perspective. As
mentioned by Merriam (2009), a qualitative case study is appropriate if a researcher needs to
understand a single entity or phenomenon comprehensively as it provides an intensive and
holistic product of investigation. This is also in line with Hamied (2017) who stated that
qualitative research is appropriate to be used when the researcher intends to explore feelings,
values, and perceptions which affect behavior.

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The context of the study

This current study was conducted at a public Junior High School in Pekan Baru, Riau. The
school, SMP Hebat (a pseudonym), was a newly-built school which was initially used 2013
curriculum before they decided to change it into school curriculum (KTSP) a year after that,
due to the limited teaching and learning facilities and the inability of teachers to implement 2013
curriculum. The school had twelve classes with four classes for each grade. Each class consisted
of thirty-eight students in which the majority of them came from parents who worked as traders.
The classes were shared with four English teachers.
Regarding the participant of the study, the researcher purposefully selected the participant
based on the following criteria: participant’ experiences in teaching English and participant and
the researcher's relationship. The participant’s experiences of teaching are expected to give
much information regarding how she perceived remedial teaching to deal with low-achievers.
The focus of the study was not limited only on how the participant perceived, but also how she
experienced it, her understanding toward remedial teaching, and what problems she might
encounter in conducting remedial teaching as well. Moreover, the researcher assumed that the
school in which the participant was teaching and the curriculum used might influence how she
perceived remedial teaching. Meanwhile, since the openness of the participant while being
interviewed was crucial to get much and deep information, the participant and researcher’s
relationship became another consideration.
Considering those criteria, an English teacher who taught seven grade students was
selected. Ana (a pseudonym) is an experienced female teacher who has been teaching for almost
ten years and has also been certified as a professional teacher. She also experienced in teaching
in several schools with different characteristics before she ended up teaching in her current
school starting from 2014. Three of the schools were public schools one of which was the one
where she was teaching at the time of the study while the other two were private schools. The
data of this current study were gained from her experiences in conducting remedial teaching in
those aforementioned schools. This thirty-four-year-old participant is the researcher’s colleague.
Their relationship started when they together pursued their master’s degree at an Indonesian
university majoring English education at the time of this study. Their personal relationship was
expected to lead to a certain openness in their interview process.
Data collection and analysis
The data were collected in through two methods: semi-structured interview as the main
data collection supported by documents analysis. The semi-structured interview was used to dig

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information regarding Ana’s perception and what problems she encountered in doing the
remedial teaching. This semi-structured interview allowed the researcher to respond to the
situation at hand, and to new ideas on the topic. Some questions were used to confirm the result
of document analysis. This one-on-one interview was tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim
to get an accurate record of the conversation while the researcher was making some brief notes
during the interview. To complete the information related to Ana’s remedial teaching program
design, her lesson plans and semester program documents were analysed. The lesson plans and
semester program documents are chosen because they contain how she planned to achieve
teaching objectives. They also comprised teaching objectives, teaching material, teaching
methods, assessment system as well as their remedial teaching plans. The analysis in this context
only focused on remedial teaching plans section. Honestly, since this study tried to explore
remedial teaching program implementation, the researcher should acknowledge that it would
be more informative if this data collection was completed with an observation to see how it was
conducted in a real situation. However, observation during November and December was
difficult to realize since those months were the months when the school was having a final
semester examination in the context of the academic year of Indonesia education system that
the participant did not have time to be observed.
The interview was taken once and lasted around thirty minutes. The focus of the interview
ranged to several topics which included her understanding on what made the students failed to
reach targeted score, how she dealt with low-achievers, how she perceived remedial teaching
program, how she conducted it, and what problems he encountered in doing remedial teaching
program as well. The analysis results were also presented based on those aforementioned
interview topics in sequence.

D. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Factors contributing to the students' failure in achieving the targeted score
At the beginning of the interview, the researcher tried to figure out what made the students
fail to reach the targeted score. He believed that what made the students fail was fundamental
to be figured out since it might be useful for every teacher to find ways to solve it. In Ana’s
words:
There are two main causes why students cannot achieve the targeted score or KKM. Firstly, it
is because the students have a mindset that English is a difficult subject to learn. Secondly,
because of that mindset, the students then lack the motivation to learn which automatically
makes them ignore what we teach. They then sometimes do not really care about what we
teach (interview, Ana, p.1).

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Surprisingly, based on her statements, instead of mentioning technical issues such as

teaching methodology, and lack of supporting facilities as the researcher would expect, she
opted to dig the causes into a deeper problem. Her statements clearly indicated that the major
problems that the students face were their negative perspective on the English subject that then
led them to have low motivation to learn English. Although the statements were in her own
opinion, it could be seen that she used the first person plural form ‘we' which indicated that she
tried to align her viewpoint to other teachers in general which meant that according to her,
other teachers would share similar experience and perceptions. For her, the impact of low
motivation made the students ignored what she was doing in the classroom and seemed to be
not interested in the teaching activities. In other words, whatever teaching methods she applied
in the classroom, the students would still be uninterested in learning.
In another opportunity, Ana even seemed to blame the low inputs that the school had from
the first place as another cause of students’ failure in achieving KKM score. In Anna’s account:
In my school, the majority of my students have been low-achievers since they were from
elementary schools. My school is newly built in that area so perhaps the students were not
selected through a tight selection process. Almost all students who registered were accepted by
the school. Some students are good but the majority of the students are low-achievers
(interview, Ana, p. 3).
For Ana, it was important for a school to have a good admission process to capture good
and quality students which was probably not conducted by the school where she taught. She
also questioned how her school accepted the majority of the students who registered to the
school. This statements might indicate that teaching the students who were academically low
from the beginning was challenging and needed extra energy to conduct.
The information from Ana that low-achievers were influenced by their negative
perspectives which led to low motivation and also by low inputs which her school gained
seemed to be in line with Othman and Shuqair's (2013) study which found that students’
negative attitude toward English language, their low of seriousness in learning and low
motivation as well indeed influence the success of the students in learning the language.
Meanwhile, Selvarajan and Vasanthagumar (2012) in their analysis about the reasons for low
achievement preferred to mention the external factors such as lack of parents' support in their
children's education and severe poverty as the main factors affecting students' low
achievements, these external factors were mentioned to lead to the students' irregular
attendance at school, for instance.
Knowing those problems, Ana admitted that the most important thing a teacher should do
to address those low-motivated students was trying to attract the students’ attention to her
subject. In Ana’s words:

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First of all, I try to make them love me, maybe, with my look or with my talking style or from
the way I motivate them in order to make them interested in English. Secondly, perhaps, I try
to design a teaching material and teaching activities as interesting as possible or as simple as
possible that they can easily understand what they are learning that day (interview, p. 1) .
Ana’s utterances interestingly indicated that the most fundamental factor that should be
paid more attention was how to maintain a good relationship between her and the students.
Although she seemed to be uncertain with these, (see the use of hedging words such as ‘maybe’
and ‘perhaps’ in her statements), she believed that the opportunity to get students' interest in
English is bigger if she changed the way she looked in front of the students, the way she talked
to them, and the way she encouraged the students to keep learning. She also mentioned that it
would be also beneficial if she could create a teaching material and design teaching activities
which are as interesting and simple as possible.
In relation to teaching activities, the proceeding answer showed that she admitted that
attractive teaching activities made the students happy to learn although the results of students’
score did not increase too significantly. However, according to her, what mattered more at that
moment was to see that the students’ improvement in their interest in English. Knowing that
the students were happy with teaching activities was considered as an achievement for her. As
stated by Ana:
…when I bring a media such as video in the classroom, the students seem very happy.
Although the result (the score) is not increasing significantly, that's my effort to interest them
to learn English (Interview, Ana, p. 1).

Remedial teaching program in Ana’s viewpoint

I mean, as I said before, there are many students who do not like learning English, who have
different characteristics, so remedial teaching program is a program where I can review the
teaching process so that low-achievers can comprehend teaching material I give (interview,
Ana, p. 1).

When the researcher asked her about remedial teaching program, Ana believed that
remedial teaching program was a program which was designed to re-arrange and evaluate
teaching activities which had not been mastered by the students yet. She also said that the
purpose of remedial teaching program was to help low-achievers to achieve learning objectives.
The program should be able to cover students with different characteristics and interest in
English. Her definition of remedial teaching program was in line with previously mentioned
theories. Thus, it showed that she already had a good understanding of what function of
remedial teaching program was.
In relation to the benefit that the students got from doing remedial teaching program, she
insisted that remedial teaching program was helpful to assist low-achievers to understand the
teaching materials better since the materials were taught more than once. In other words,

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repetition of learning the same materials made the students get a better score. In addition to
that, she also mentioned that by having more interactions with those students in remedial
teaching program, she could know her students better and they would have a good relationship
with her, as the teacher. In her words:
Of course, they will understand more the teaching material because it is taught more than once
(laughter). Secondly, because we often interact with them, they feel more closed to us (laughter)
(interview, Ana, p. 3).
She also added that the remedial teaching program gave her a satisfaction as she could see
that the student achieved the teaching objectives or passed targeted KKM score.
Although Ana’s statement did not seem in line with Othman and Shuqair's (2013)
explanation that students would not benefit from remedial teaching program if the teachers
keep using the same teaching methods over and over and could not find a good way to teach
students considering the short periods of time available, the information from Ana’s point of
view was considered to be in line with Cheng's (2014) analysis result which mentioned that
remedial teaching was basically beneficial to the low-achievers’ academic and emotional self-
efficacy, a point which was important in the students’ learning success. However, Cheng also
emphasized that those benefits would only be gained if remedial teaching program was
supported by the awareness of the students’ to conduct individualized remedial program
combined with teacher’s direct supervision and an appropriate support system, something
which is according to Ana, was quite difficult to find to her low-motivated students to try to
improve their self-efficacy and her school which seemed not to pay more attention on this.
From Ana’s perspectives, it appeared that by conducting remedial teaching, she believed that it
would not only improve students’ academic scores but it would also be able to build her
students’ good emotional relationship with her when having interaction in remedial teaching
program so that they would be encouraged and motivated to learn English.
Interestingly, when asked about whether all the teachers conducted remedial teaching for
low-achievers, she honestly admitted that not all teachers conducted remedial teaching for those
students.
No, not all teachers. It depends on the teacher. Some teachers do not conduct it and just give
the students standard score (a minimum score which already passes the KKM score) because
they think that when given remedial teaching, these low-achievers will still get a bad score or
even worst score so conducting remedial teaching will be useless (laughter)…some teachers
just give the low-achievers minimum scores only to fulfil their responsibility to submit the
students’ scores for a report (interview, Ana, p. 7).
From the interview, it could be understood that some teachers opted not to conduct
remedial teaching program and preferred to give them minimum KKM score to meet the
requirement to be reported to school and considered that they already achieved the learning

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objectives. Although this information might not be able to be generalized to all teachers as Ana
said but by referring to ‘some teachers’, this information showed that there was indeed an
interesting fact that some teachers thought that remedial teaching program was not the way they
choose to help low-achievers. This information certainly could not emerge instantly without
any reasons. Those teachers might decide to do this through their experiences in conducting
remedial teaching before probably in previous years with different students which then led them
to a conclusion that remedial teaching was not helping and probably burdening both teacher
and students.
The interview results also showed that in conducting remedial teaching, the first thing that
she usually did was to analyze what part or what indicator which has been mastered by the
students. In her words:
After having an examination or having known the results of assignment the students do, I
analyze them to see which part of the materials which the students have not mastered yet
(interview, Ana, p. 2).
By doing so, she also found out which students who belong to low-achievers and need a
remedy. After analyzing, she began to design a remedial program which she thought that it
would help those low-achievers. If the majority of the students failed, she would design a
teaching program with different methods of teaching and simplified teaching materials and
assignment as well. In Ana’s words:
If (I) found many (low-achievers), I need additional time to conduct remedial teaching to
review the materials, only certain parts, of course. I try to make the materials easier for them
(interview, Ana, p.1).

Meanwhile, a personal approach was also preferred by Ana if she thought that the materials
were too difficult only for certain students. Albeit being time-consuming, a personal approach
was probably helpful to deal with low-achievers who have a different pace of learning since they
were extensively drilled out of the whole class in which their opportunity to ask what they had
not understood yet was limited.
Her explanation showed that Ana had already had enough knowledge on the procedures
of conducting remedial teaching program in which it was accordance to what Djamarah and
Zain (2002), and Makmun's (2005) explanation that if the teacher needed to have an effective
remedial teaching program, a teacher should start with diagnosing students’ learning difficulties
before deciding the actions dealing with students’ problems. Diagnosing students’ learning
difficulties also offered an opportunity for the teacher to know which students who needed
more help and their level of difficulty which affected the selection of the actions to be addressed
to.

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Problems in conducting remedial teaching program

In addition, to be able to comprehensively derive information about what happened to the
teacher in conducting remedial teaching, it was fundamental to also discuss Ana’s problems
regarding remedial teaching program. Based on the interview analysis, the researcher divided
the problems into two: external problems and internal problems.
With respect to the external problems, it was found that the main barrier encountered by
the teacher is the time limitation. As mentioned by Ana:

Adjusting to the time. I need to find spare time. The point is I have to finish remedial teaching
before submitting all students’ final scores after mid-semester or semester test (interview, Ana,
p. 2-3).
She also added that:
…but sometimes, it becomes more complicated when some students fail at the first remedial
teaching test and are also included in the second remedial teaching (interview, Ana, p. 3).

Her words explicitly pictured how she fought to help low-achievers to get a better score in
a very limited time available. In one side, she only had a very little time to conduct a remedial
teaching, but on the other side, she should be able to cover all students' problems which were
sometimes complicated as some students found to still fail after being given a remedial teaching.
When asked about the possibility that the limited time issue was caused by her teaching
planning, she answered that the curriculum policy which burdened the students with too many
subjects in one time caused a great impact on students’ achievement and time availability. In
her words:
The students learn not only English but also other subjects. They have so many assignments
to finish in almost at the same time. So we have to ask the students when they are ready to
have remedial teaching (interview, Ana, p. 4).
What could be seen here was that it appeared that too many subjects which should be
learned by the students with their different assignments limited the opportunity to conduct
remedial teaching for English. It indirectly pushed the teacher to wait until the students have
time to be available to have a remedial program. The decision to wait until they were ready to
have a remedy certainly risked the chance to help them achieve learning objectives since there
was no guarantee that they were ready or not. That also noted that burdening students with
many subjects would lead to the difficulty for the students to make the priority in their studying
programs which inevitably influenced their achievements.
Talking about the internal problem, it was found that teacher's difficulty in adjusting the
time to conduct remedial teaching program was supported with the difficulty in simplifying
teaching materials. By her account:

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So there is a problem related to time in designing remedial teaching program. Then,

determining a simple learning material which could be easily understood by the students are
very difficult. Very difficult for low-achievers (Interview, Ana, p. 5).
Besides having difficulty in adjusting the appropriate time to conduct remedial teaching, there
was also a problem related to designing the program. From her statements, it was understood
that she was aware that what she should do was to simplify the teaching materials in order to
be easily comprehended by low-achievers. However, it needed time to prepare it and more
importantly, there was a problem with the way to simplify teaching materials in a limited time.
Her difficulty was intensified by the use of the repetition of adverbial degree ‘very' to show us
that this problem was something she really emphasized. The need to simplify teaching materials
was already emphasized in Panduan Penilaian Kurikulum 2013 or the Evaluation Guidelines of
2013 curriculum that a teacher should be able to simplify teaching materials and simplified tests
delivered together with different teaching methods (Dirjendikdasmen, 2015).
Regarding the remedial teaching planning, as seen in her prosem (semester program) and
lesson plans documents, although it appeared that Ana explicitly included remedial teaching
program and allocated specific time for a remedial teaching program in her prosem, she seemed
to still have difficulty in realization. Confirming this, Ana once again said that the problem was
laid on the time availability and she related the problem to the school’s policy. In her words:
The problem is in the time. Good schools usually provide all teachers at least a week to prepare
the program before being submitted to the schools, finishing the program together and making
a workshop related to program designing. But our school does not do such a thing. We are just
reminded that tomorrow we should bring this and that (laughter), bring a lesson plan, but the
school does not make us do that. I'm sure we would do that if the school made us do so
(interview, Ana, p.7).
In Ana’s point of view, teachers might understand that they need to spare particular time
only for low-achievers’ remedy, but there were still many teachers who were not aware of what
should be the priority for them, what should they prepare in the coming teaching process and
how to manage the prepared time to be able to deliver all teaching materials effectively or
allocate their time efficiently to accommodate all their works including regular teaching process,
doing assessment, and conducting remedial teaching program for low-achievers. Therefore, the
role of school policy was pivotal to help those teachers make use the time as efficiently as
possible. Doing a workshop and encouraging the teachers to design and prepare the effective
program from the very beginning along with how to implement it would be helpful according
to her.
The information from Ana was basically in line with Ndebele's (2014) analysis in his study
that the main problems faced by English teachers in designing and conducting remedial teaching
program were mainly on timetabling and poorly trained teachers and lack of school supervision.

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This was also supported by Alghamdi and Siddiqui (2016) who mentioned time limitation and
lack of logistical structure became the main barriers. Seeing these problems from broader
perspectives, it could be understood that timetabling, difficulty in simplifying teaching materials,
and students' learning overloads as mentioned by Ana, were intertwined and could be related
to two major themes: teacher’s professionalism and government policy which was realized by
the school.
Teacher’s professionalism is certainly needed to be able to conduct effective teaching
process including how to deliver effective remedial teaching program. As a professional, a
teacher should be armed with skills and qualifications which involve professional competence,
pedagogical competence, personality competence and social competence (Suherdi, 2013). In
relation to time limitation, for instance, it is related to teacher’s pedagogical competence in
which it refers to teacher’s ability to restructure content knowledge for teaching purposes, and
to plan, adapt, and improvise. Apart from many subjects that the students need to learn in one
academic year, a professional teacher should be able to adjust and consider every aspect in
teaching with the availability of time in which it should be planned long before the teaching
process was started. A professional teacher should be able to predict that there must be some
students who would fail considering the different characteristics of the students, their different
motivation, their different pace of learning, and probably the failure of teacher's teaching
methods which could not cover all students' needs as well. As mentioned by Othman and
Shuqair (2013) that effective remedial teaching program is influenced by the implementation of
strategic plans by the teacher.
However, blaming the teachers for this seems to exaggerate since there should be a support
from the school and the stakeholders for teacher's professional development. As a teacher
works under the system run by the school, a good school should be able to facilitate and give
ongoing support to both teachers and the students’ needs. As stated by Richards (2002), an
institution such as schools and language course has pivotal roles to create effective teaching
since it is where the teaching process takes place, it provides rules, purpose and can enforce
rules of human behavior. Regarding teacher’s difficulty in timetabling, simplifying the teaching
materials, and student’s learning overloads, for example, there should be a role which the school
could do in this context. A school could provide the teachers opportunities to develop their
skills by providing some activities such as observation of experienced teachers, observation of
training videos, short theory courses, a workshop on teaching planning, practice teaching under
the supervision, and or working with a mentor teacher. As teachers develop experience in
teaching, the institution also needs to create an environment in which teachers can further

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develop their teaching skills and subject-matter knowledge, deepen their understanding of
teaching and themselves as teachers, and have the opportunity for further professional
development.

E. CONCLUSION
The case study presented in this paper was an effort to figure out the remedial teaching
program in an English teacher's perspective. It was also aimed at discovering the problems the
participant encountered in conducting remedial teaching programs. Summing up from the
analysis, it could be understood that failing students or the ones who could not achieve KKM
in this study context are influenced by their negative perspectives on English subject from the
first place which leads to the low motivation to learn the subject and low inputs which the
school had. Therefore, interesting teaching activities and teacher's approaches are needed to
gain students' attention toward English subject. The study also discovered that, according to
the participant, both teacher and low-achievers benefit from the remedial teaching programs.
However, some problems such as time limitation, teacher's difficulty in designing appropriate
and simplified teaching materials, students' learning overloads, and lack of school support
challenge the effectiveness of conducting remedial teaching programs.
Taking everything into consideration, some recommendations here are probably needed to
consider. Teachers, EFL teachers in particular, for instance, need to understand that indeed,
there is no size fit all and the chance to have low-achievers considering every aspect and
condition of schools, students' diversity and school's lack of supports are inevitable. However,
they should need to realize that they also need to improve their teaching expertise and
competencies including how to design and plan remedial teaching programs to deal with those
low-achievers since the responsibility to help those low-achievers is mainly on their shoulders
supported with the appropriate school’s policy which facilitates it. Besides, the researcher admits
that the result of this present study is limited in the sense that it could not see remedial teaching
programs implementation in a real situation. Using observation to see the real conditions of
remedial teaching implementation in the classroom would be beneficial to fill the gap. Besides,
since this study does not cover how the students perceive this remedial teaching program, it
might be interesting to analyse it from the students’ point of view for further study.

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