Online IELTS (International English Language Testing System) Training for High School Teachers as Preparation for Applying for Foreign Scholarships

: IELTS is a mandatory requirement in applying for overseas master's degree scholarships. However, many people, including senior and vocational high school teachers in Selong City, East Lombok, face difficulty answering IELTS questions. Other than having no educational background in the English Language, they also have no time to take IELTS courses because of their heavy workload. Therefore, this community service activity aims to provide IELTS training to high school teachers in Selong City, East Lombok. This IELTS training is expected to help them meet the IELTS score when applying for overseas scholarships. Twenty teachers participated in this IELTS training, which was held in August 2023. Data from the pre-test and post-test revealed that the participants showed increased IELTS scores, although insignificant. Besides, data obtained from the online questionnaire and interview session showed that the participants positively responded to this IELTS training.


INTRODUCTION
Education is a fundamental pillar of a nation's progress.Without education, society will certainly lag behind in the global competitive world.Many factors certainly cause the decline of education.In Indonesia, many dropouts end up unemployed.One of Indonesia's most influential factors in education is the cost factor (Hasibuan et al., 2021;Sofya et al., 2018).
The economic situation of the Indonesian people, most of whom are below the poverty line, as mentioned by Mujiati et al., (2018), is one of the reasons they cannot afford school fees and eventually fail to continue to higher levels.However, there are many ways to ensure that someone can still receive an education.One way is through scholarship programs (Aliyyah et al., 2020).There are quite a few scholarship programs, both from the government and from private parties, that offer financial assistance for education every year.These scholarship programs vary, ranging from non-degree scholarships (short courses, research, internships) to degree scholarships (Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D.) offered by domestic and foreign governments.These scholarship programs can be easily obtained as long as the applicants meet the criteria or requirements listed.One of the scholarships that is a dream for students who have graduated from Bachelor's programs is the foreign Master's degree scholarship.
Many foreign Master's degree scholarship programs open registration every year, and successful applicants will have the opportunity to attend master's level lectures in certain countries.The target of these Master's degree scholarship programs is usually bachelor's graduates who already have work experience and meet the English language proficiency test scores.Besides TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), the English language proficiency test that is often a requirement for applying for foreign Master's degree scholarships is IELTS (International English Language Testing System).For example, the Chevening scholarship opens registration every year for Indonesian citizens to continue their master's studies at prestigious universities in England.This scholarship requires applicants to have a minimum IELTS score of 6.5 to proceed to the next selection stage.Meanwhile, the LPDP (Education Fund Management Institute) scholarship opens registration every year with various types of scholarships.For those who want to apply for regular foreign Master's degree scholarships, applicants must have a minimum IELTS score of 6.5.Of course, there are still many other types of Master's degree scholarships that can be applied for by anyone interested.
Quite a few high school teachers in Selong (East Lombok-NTB) are interested in trying to apply for these Master's degree scholarships.However, one of the registration requirements that they find difficult to fulfill is the IELTS score.Besides the cost of the IELTS test, many of them admit that they do not have experience in studying IELTS or taking the IELTS test.They feel more familiar with the TOEFL test.Rooted from this problem, this Community Service activity aims to provide an opportunity for high school teachers in Selong who are interested in attending free online IELTS training via the Zoom application.This is done online because of the participants' location differences, making scheduling difficult.So, it was agreed that the training would be conducted online using the Zoom application.This kind of PkM activity has also been carried out by several people in Indonesia (Daud et al., 2022;Mahmud, 2022;Nurchaerani & Nursyamsi, 2021;Onny & Renreng, 2020;Susanti et al., 2022;Widiyarto et al., 2021).
The understanding gained from this IELTS training is expected to help them understand the IELTS test more deeply and become a capital for them to achieve the certain IELTS score required by their dream Master's scholarships.Specifically, the type of IELTS in this training is academic IELTS.As we know, there are two types of IELTS: general IELTS (for work or residency purposes) and academic IELTS (for educational purposes).Because scholarships are closely related to education programs and are used as registration requirements for foreign Master's degree scholarships, this academic IELTS type is used as the training in this Community Service activity.

METHOD
The method used in implementing this community service activity is by applying the Service-Learning (SL) method, where the community servers provide IELTS learning services to high school teachers in Selong, East Lombok.It should be noted that this IELTS training was held four times a week on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Regarding the teaching materials, the book used in this IELTS training was the book "IELTS Strategies and Tips" by Dr. Lin Lougheed, 2nd edition published in 2013.Participants were provided with this IELTS book in PDF format, which they could print themselves.For your information, this book contains strategies and tips for quickly answering the four components of the IELTS test (listening, reading, writing, speaking).These strategies and tips were taught to the participants and served as the approach in this IELTS training.
A pre-test was given before the training began to determine the IELTS scores of the participants.After the training ended, participants took a posttest to determine their changes in IELTS scores.Additionally, participants were asked to answer some questions in a questionnaire provided online through Google Forms.This questionnaire contained several questions about the participants' perceptions of the IELTS training they had attended and any suggestions they could give, as seen in Figure 1.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The data obtained in the pre-test and post-test showed a change in each participant's IELTS scores, which can be seen in the Table 2.For the sake of personal data, the participants' real names are listed in initials only.IELTS skills yet.The data obtained in the pre-test and post-test shows that the participants showed an increase in IELTS scores, although not too significant.Additionally, during the interview process, many participants gave positive responses to this IELTS training because they felt the benefits of helping them work on the academic test type of IELTS.
The implications that can be obtained from the implementation of this community service activity are that IELTS training can be concluded to be very helpful for alumni to improve their knowledge and skills in IELTS.Furthermore, this community service activity provides information for us to know the perceptions of alumni about this IELTS training and the suggestions they can give for the success of future IELTS training.
Although the implementation of this community service activity was quite beneficial, there are still some shortcomings.Besides the number of alumni participating in this IELTS training not being too many, the training time was also not long enough.The implementation of IELTS training in the future may be able to involve more participants and allocate a longer training time.

Figure 1
Figure 1 Athmospehe during the online IELTS 2023 training Thursday for approximately one month, namely in August 2023.As mentioned earlier, this IELTS training was conducted online through the Zoom application.The participants in this IELTS training were 20 high school teachers in Selong with different Physics Education, and Biology Education).They are interested in applying for foreign Master's scholarships but still have a limited understanding of IELTS.Therefore, they felt the need to attend IELTS training early to prepare for applying for Master's scholarships in the future.

Table 2
Results of the pre-test and posttest of the IELTS 2023 training participants