Jumat, 07 November 2014

PENGEMBANGAN MATERI BELAJAR MEMBACA BAGI SISWA KELAS X 
SMAN I SEYEGAN DI TAHUN AJARAN  2012/2013

DEVELOPING READING LEARNING MATERIALS FOR GRADE X STUDENTS OF
SMAN I SEYEGAN IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2012/2013

Ihtiara Fitrianingsih1, Suwarsih Madya2
ihtiarafitrianingsih@gmail.com1, madyasuwarsih@gmail.com2

Abstrak
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan materi belajar membaca yang sesuai dengan kebutuhan pembelajaran siswa Kelas X SMAN I Seyegan pada tahun ajaran 2012/2013. Penelitian pengembangan ini dilaksanakan melalui sembilan langkah, yaitu: 1) pengembangan instrumen penelitian, 2) identifikasi dan eksplorasi kebutuhan belajar siswa yang meliputi kebutuhan pembelajaran dan target pembelajaran siswa, 3) pendesainan silabus, 4) penyusunan draf 1 materi belajar, 5) evaluasi pra-penggunaan, 6) pengembangan draf 2 materi belajar, 7) uji coba materi belajar, 8) evaluasi pasca-penggunaan, dan 9) revisi dan pengembangan produk akhir. Hasil penelitian ini adalah sebagai berikut. 1) Materi belajar membaca yang telah dikembangkan dan sesuai untuk siswa kelas X SMAN I Seyegan berupa empat unit materi cetak yang digunakan sebagai materi balajar tambahan dalam pembelajaran teks news item dan narrative pada semester kedua Kelas X. 2) Berdasarkan data hasil uji coba, materi belajar membaca yang dihasilkan sesuai dengan kebutuhan pembelajaran dan target pembelajaran siswa. 3) Hasil evaluasi materi belajar yang dilakukan oleh siswa dan kolega menunjukkan bahwa materi belajar membaca yang dihasilkan sesuai dengan kebutuhan siswa. Produk akhir penelitian ini juga telah dianalisis berdasarkan pada kebutuhan pembelajaran kosakata (3000 kata berfrekuensi tinggi) dan keterampilan mikro membaca sehingga distribusi keduanya lebih sesuai dan seimbang.

Kata kunci: pengembangan materi, keterampilan membaca, kelas X SMA


Abstract
This study aims to develop reading learning materials which are appropriate to the needs of Grade X students of SMAN 1 Seyegan in the academic year of 2012/2013. This research and development study was carried out in nine stages, namely 1) instrument development, 2) identification and exploration of needs, covering the student’s and teachers’ learning needs and target needs, 3) course grid design, 4) the development of the first drafts of the learning materials, 5) pre-use evaluation, 6) the development of the second drafts of the learning materials, 7) try-out of the materials, 8) post-use evaluation, and 9) revision & final material production. The results of the study show the following. 1) The developed reading learning materials which are appropriate for grade X students of SMAN 1 Seyegan are four units of printed materials which are used as additional learning materials in learning the news item and narrative texts in the second semester of grade X. Based on the tryout data, the reading learning materials are appropriate to the target needs and the learning needs of the students. 3) The results of the material evaluations by the students and the colleagues reveal that the reading learning materials are appropriate with the target and learning needs of the students. The final products of this study were also analyzed based on the needs of vocabulary (3000 high frequency words) and micro skills of reading so that both needs are equally and sufficiently distributed in the units.

Keywords: material development, reading skills, grade X of Senior High School



Background

In the academic year of 2012/2013, the School-Based Curriculum for grade X of Senior High School requires students to comprehend and create short functional texts, monologues and essays in the form of procedure, descriptive, recount, narrative, and news item (Depdiknas, 2006). Teachers are also required to select, use, and/or provide materials in order to help the students’ learning on the texts. To be resourceful of teaching reading, therefore, it is important for teachers to have ample skills in providing appropriate learning materials so that the students can learn the subject matters appropriately and sufficiently.
In reference to the interview with the grade X English teacher of SMAN I Seyegan in Sleman subdistric which was conducted on the 20th April 2013, the researcher found that the teacher still needed to work hard in providing the students with learning materials which are suitable for their needs. The interview results show that grade X students of SMAN I Seyegan learned English in classes by using workbooks or Lembar Kerja Siswa (LKS) without having any textbook of their own. For introducing new texts, the teacher said, she needed to retype the materials from the textbook and present them, for example, in a two-page handout in order that the students could have its copies. Then, the students would be working on the workbooks for the tasks. Considering that teaching materials are one of key components in most language programs (Richard, 2001: 251), teachers and students should be provided with a great deal of teaching resources. Allwright (1990), as quoted by Kitao (1997), says that materials should teach students to learn, that they should be resource books for ideas and activities for instruction/learning.  Besides, every learning material taken from various sources should be adapted or modified to suit students’ target needs and learning needs (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987) or in Nation’s (2010: 24) words, should match with students’ needs, lack and wants. 
However, there are some evidences showing that materials available in the market, especially the workbooks or Lembar kerja Siswa (LKS) do not have the criteria of good instructional materials. Two workbooks that the researcher had reviewed do not have the criteria of good reading materials in which they do not allow the learners to develop certain micro skills of reading and that some principles in teaching reading are not applied yet. Moreover, when they are applied in the classroom, the materials do not match with students’ lacks, needs, and wants. However, developing such good materials is not a short and simple thing to do. In providing such good reading materials, some steps in needs analysis and material development stages should be done. This is why the researcher developed learning materials to teach reading skills for grade X students of SMAN 1 Seyegan through doing research and development.


Research Method

This research and development was carried on May – June 2013 on SMAN 1 Seyegan, Sleman, Yogyakarta Special Province. 163 respondents were involved in the study, consisting of 157 students (2 students for the first-piloting of the needs analysis questionnaire, 4 students for the second-piloting of the needs analysis questionnaire, 61 students as the respondents of the needs analysis, 157 students for the tryout and post-use evaluation), 1 English teacher for the needs analysis and material evaluation, 1 expert and 1 colleague for the pre-use evaluation, and 3 colleagues for the material evaluation.
To develop reading materials which are appropriate for the students, there are some steps which should be carried out carefully. The processes are 1) instrument development, 2) identification and exploration of needs, covering the student’s and teachers’ learning needs and target needs, 3) course grid design, 4) the development of the first drafts of the learning materials, 5) pre-use evaluation, 6) the development of the second drafts of the learning materials, 7) try-out of the materials, 8) post-use evaluation, and 9) revision & final material production. The flow of the processes above are presented on Figure 1.
The first development step was developing research instruments, such as needs analysis questionnaire, material evaluation questionnaires, and interview guidelines, whilst field notes were developed during the tryout of the second draft of the learning materials.
Then, after the needs analysis instruments were piloted and revised, they are used to gather the data about the students’ target needs and learning needs. The data about the students’ needs cover their eight categories of target needs and seven categories of learning needs which include the students’: 1) profile (age, sex and language), 2) learning objectives, 3) L1 and L2 literacy skills, 4) frequency of learning the four skills, 5) background as a reader, 6) familiarity with genres of texts, 7) use of reading strategies, 8) performance on the micro skills of reading, and their choice of  9) topic, 10) learning activities, 10) homework, 11) learning feedback, 12) task setting, 13) role for learning, and 14) role of the teacher. After the needs are noted, the crousegrid of the learning materials is designed. Later, the first draft of the learning materials are developed based on the coursegrid.


 
















Figure 1. The Material Development Model Applied in the Study
(modified from Brown, 1995: 164 and Jolly & Bolitho in Tomlinson, 1998: 98)



The next step was the pre-use evaluation of the first draft of the learning materials on which some material expert are working. After the data of the pre-use evaluation was gathered and analyzed quantitatively, the first draft of the learning materials were revised. Then, the second draft of the learning materials were tried out to the students as they also gave the post-use evaluation data through questionnaires. Besides, three colleagues who ever worked on the similar study also evaluated the materials by using a different material evaluation questionnaire. In this stage, the material evaluators investigate the six categories of evaluation, such as 1) layout and graphic, 2) language, 3) content, 4) activity, 5) language skill, and 6) support.The English teacher also contributed to the post-use evaluation through an interview. After all the data are gathered, they are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively.
As the questionnaires were close-ended, most of them use five-scaled items. The formula for counting the interval/range will be: five minus one per five, which equals to 0.79. By using this formula, the interpretation of the questionnaire data uses the Table 1. Meanwhile, to analyze the qualitative data, the five stages of data analysis suggested by Burns (1999: 157-160) are referred. They are: 1) assembling the data, 2) coding the data, 3) comparing the data, 4) building interpretations, and 5) reporting the outcomes.


Finding and Discussion

The descriptions of the developed reading learning materials

            From the needs analysis data, it is found that the needed learning materials are in the form of four units of printed reading learning materials which were developed for around-16-year-old students. The topics, as covered in the four units, are: Smartphone Hunt (technology-news items), Celebrity Update (entertainment-news items), Sweet Love (love-narratives), and Adventure Time (adventure-narratives). Describing the layout of the learning materials, the pictures appearing in the first-two pages, the task numbering system  and the organization of these units adapted  the design of learning materials in the English Buku Sekolah Elektonik (BSE) or Electronic Books developed by Joko Priyana (2008) namely Interlanguage: English for Senior High School Students X. The materials were organized to have the following features: 1) Let’s Explore, 2) Let’s Read, 3) Let’s Do More, 4) Homework, 5)Let’s Reflect, and 6) Let’s Summarize.



Table 1. Scales for the Closed-Ended Questionnaires and Its Interpretation

Scale
1
2
3
4
5
Means
1.00 – 1.79
1.80 – 2.59
2.60 – 3.39
3.40 – 4.19
4.20 – 5.00
Interpretation
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Partly Agree
Agree
Strongly Agree




Let’s Explore is a part consisting of tasks for leading students to the subject matter discussed throughout the unit. It may consist of 2-3 tasks. Students may be lead to think about their existing knowledge about the theme (i.e. music), study their vocabulary related to the theme, etc.  In Let’s Read, students are provided by some sample reading texts and tasks related to the texts. The tasks may in the form of matching statements and pictures, answering comprehension questions, ordering a sequence of pictures, mind mapping the information given in a reading text, studying a grammar explanation related to the reading text, doing grammar exercises, previewing a text, skimming a text, studying the organization of a genre of text discussed in the unit, labeling the text based on its generic structure, etc. In this part the students may also found wise words related to the moral value introduced in one of the reading text. The tasks also enable the students to work either in pairs, in groups or individually.
In Let’s Do More, the students may work in pairs and individually to do four or five extra reading activities. However, Let’s Do More is focused for individual tasks in order to develop the students’ self confidence in doing reading tasks.  The next feature is Homework. Homework may consist of extra reading tasks, for example, reading a reading text and answering some comprehension questions, finding another reading text in newspaper or other media and making its summary, summarizing a given text, etc. Whilst in Let’s Reflect students are required to mention and write what they like best in the unit, what they do not like in the unit, what seems difficult in the unit and what improvement they made after learning in the unit. At last, Let’s Summarize listed what the students have learnt. It consists of a genre of text with its organization, the grammar point presented in the unit, and the reading skills developed in the unit. This feature helps the students to memorize and review what they have learnt in order that they can think of how much they learn in the unit.
Besides having the features mentioned above, the learning materials also developed to have consistent lay out in each unit. Start from the first page, the students can find the unit number followed by the unit title in the upper front of the unit (in page 1). In this page, the students would also find a big picture covering 75% of the page. This picture usually gives the students the first image for imagination to what would be given in the unit. Next, in page 2, the students can find another big picture representing the theme of the unit. Under the picture, there are two or three paragraphs describing what the students are going to learn in the unit.  Meanwhile, in page 3 students are provided with reading tasks organized in each feature.  The icon and color of each feature and task are always consistent. Besides, among the tasks in Let’s Read, students can also find a page having a box containing wise words in the lower end of the page.
Evaluation results

Based on the tryout and the evaluation data, it is found that Unit 1 is appropriate, with the total means score of 4.13 (from the colleagues) and 4.14 (from the students). The layout and graphic of the unit is categorized as very appropriate, with the means score of 4.33. Moreover, the language, content, activity, language skill, and support of Unit 1 are categorized as appropriate, with means score ranging from 3.92 - 4.13. However, some revision on the grammar and spelling are made. In addition, some improvements are made in Task 2, Task 5, Task 7, Task 8, Task 11, Task 13 and Task 16. The researcher also revised the explanation on the passive voice in this unit.
Next, Unit 2 is also categorized as appropriate unit with total means score of 4.16 (from the colleagues) and 3.89 (from the students). The layout and graphic, language, content, activity, language skill, and support of Unit 2 are categorized as appropriate, with means score ranging from 3.84 - 4.56. However, some improvements are made in Task 6, Task 7, Task 8 and Task 10. The researcher also revised the activities in order to support the learning of passive voice, grammar, skimming and mind mapping.
Then, Unit 3 is categorized as appropriate unit, with total means score of 4.07 (from the colleagues) and 4.02 (from the students). The layout and graphic, language, content, activity, language skill, and support of Unit 3 are also categorized as appropriate, with means score ranging from 3.92 – 4.21. However, some improvements are made in Task 9, Task10 and Task 16.
At last, Unit 4 is found as appropriate unit, with total means score of 4.23 (from the colleagues) and 4.03 (from the students). The layout and graphic, language, content, activity, language skill, and support of Unit 4 are also categorized as appropriate, with means ranging from 3.84 – 4.44. However, some improvements are made in Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 14 and Task 17. The researcher also revised the texts in Unit 4 in order that the language level of the texts suits the students’ level of learning.


Analysis of vocabulary and micro skills of reading

As summarized, based on the evaluation questionnaires the developed reading learning materials have appropriate layout and graphic, language, content, activity, language skill, and support. However, an analysis on the language skills which are planned to be developed by the learning materials should be carried out. The language skills that should be analyzed include the micro skill and vocabulary. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate how the learning materials can help learners develop the needed micro skills and the vocabulary.
 Regarding the vocabulary mastery, McCarten (2007: 2) states “students need to be self-sufficient learners. It is unlikely that teachers can cover in class the huge number of vocabulary items that the students will need to use or understand, so it is equally important to help students with how to learn vocabulary as well as with what to learn.” In line with this idea, the researcher adapted the texts used in the learning materials in order that the words can be understood by the learners, or in other words, at least the words used in the texts are included in the 3000 high frequency words. However, the researcher still needed to introduce some essential new words outside the 3000 high frequency words, which are needed in order to comprehend the substances or ideas being delivered by the text. Nevertheless, the learners will still be able to understand what the text is talking about as some other new words are substituted to their synonyms or restructured by other phrases or clauses to ease the learners.
To evaluate both micro skill and vocabulary, a table containing the tasks, micro skills and reading strategies developed in the units of materials were made. Besides, words learned through vocabulary lists in the units were also summarized. Then, both documents were analyzed and summarized. First, the evaluation should see how well the distribution of the micro skills is, and second, how well the distribution of part of speech is in the word lists in each unit. Both documents are presented in the appendix.
Based on the analysis, it is found that the distribution of the reading micro skills in each unit is somehow unequal as in Unit 1 and Unit 2 there are 11 micro skills, while in Unit 3 there are 13 micro skills and in Unit 4 there are 9 micro skills. It shows that some revision can be made to the existing learning materials in order that the learners can focus on micro skills of reading which the learners rarely used and they really need in comprehending English texts. Table 69 presents the results of the analysis on micro skills.
As seen in Table 2, 18 micro skills were covered in the units of learning materials. The distribution, however, is not well managed. What can be seen to cover in each unit is that there are seven micro skills which were developed, they are: 1) skimming, 2) selectively extracting the relevant points from a text, 3) scanning to locate specifically required information, 4) understanding explicitly stated information, 5) identifying the characteristics of text types (e.g. narrative, news item, etc), 6) understanding the communicative value (function) of written texts according to form and purpose, and 7) understanding relations between the parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices.
To revise the learning materials in order that they have equally and sufficiently distributed micro skills, the researcher decided to limit the micro skills to those seven micro skills plus the four low frequency micro skills mentioned in the table. The four additional skills were divided into four, so each unit would be added by one additional micro skill of reading. Thus, in each unit there would be eight micro skills to develop.




Table 2. The Micro Skills of Reading from Infrequently to Frequently Used
and Its Coverage on the Developed Learning Materials

 NO
Micro Skills of Reading
Usage Frequency
Unit
a
Transcoding information to diagrammatic display
seldom
2
b
Understanding information when not explicitly stated by inferring context
Sometimes
2,3
c
Understanding relations between  the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices
Sometimes
4
d
Connecting what they already know to new information in the text to understand the text
Sometimes
2,3
e
Understanding conceptual meaning
Sometimes
3
f
Skimming the text
Sometimes
1,2,3,4
g
Understanding relations within the sentence
Sometimes
3
h
Understanding relations between the parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices
Sometimes
1,2,3,4
i
Scanning to locate specifically required information
Sometimes
1,2,3,4
j
Distinguishing the main idea from supporting details
Sometimes
1,2
k
Using basic reference skills
Sometimes
2
l
Selectively extracting the relevant points from a text
Sometimes
1,2,3,4
m
Identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse
Sometimes
1
n
Guessing meaning of new words from context
Sometimes
1,3
o
Extracting salient points to summarize
Often
3,4
p
Understanding explicitly stated information
Often
1,2,3,4
q
Identifying the characteristics of text types (e.g. News item or narrative,)
Often
1,2,3,4
r
Understanding the communicative value (function) of written texts according to form and purpose
often
1,2,3,4





Besides the micro skills, the results of the analysis also reveal that the distribution of words from different parts of speech is unequal. In each unit, there are 25 up to 38 words that should be learned through the tasks. The words include noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. Besides learning the words and their parts of speech, learners are also provided with the phonetic transcription which are taken from the Cambridge Advance Learner’s Dictionary (Cambridge, 2008) in order that they learn how to pronoun the words correctly.
Analyzing the proportion for each part of speech, however, Table 3 shows that the words learned by the students are mostly nouns and verbs. The analysis results says that the biggest proportion is on nouns which are 48% from the total 121 words learned in the materials, and verbs which comprise 31% from the total 121 words. The other parts of speech, such as adjective, preposition, adverb and conjunction, comprise less than 18%. As mentioned in Table 70, adjectives comprise 17%, while adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions are at the least proportion that is 1%-2%.  
The analysis result shows that the developed reading learning materials were revised in order that the learners develop their vocabulary knowledge including various parts of speech in moderate proportion. Finally, the vocabulary learning aims to facilitate the learners with sufficient knowledge of the words which support their skills in comprehending the texts. Meanwhile, as students of Senior High Schools are on the intermediate learning level, they should be helped to learn the 3000 high frequently words. Thus, an analysis was also done to identify the vocabulary of texts appearing in the developed reading learning materials.
The analysis was done by identifying manually the word family (represented by symbols) of each words appearing in the text. If a unit has four texts, it might take five to ten minutes for each text to finish looking up the words appearing in the text and match them with those on the Longman Communication 3000. Each word is identified whether they have W1, W2, W3 and S1, S2, S3. Symbols W1, W2, W3 for words that are in the top 1000, 2000, and 3000 frequent words in written English, while symbols S1,S2,S3 for words that are in the top 1000, 2000, and 3000 frequent words in spoken English. After all of the words are identified, some words which are not listed in the Longman Communication 3000 are identified.
Based on the analysis result, each unit of learning material has different numbers of words to list. For the learners, more words are listed in the table, the more difficult the text to comprehend, because they should encounter more words which they do not know the meaning. It can be seen that from Unit 1 to Unit 4 learners encounter at least 21 to 71 words which are not listed in the Longman Communication 3000. As seen on the table, Unit 3 and Unit 4 require the learners to work with 12-17 unfamiliar words in each text in order to comprehend the text. This situation may become a problem for the learners when they had limited time to work with the task in which the text is on.
As in the developed reading learning materials there are still relatively more words which are outside the 3000 word list, the researcher revised the texts in order that the learners can understand the text better. To revise them, some of the words which are outside the 3000 word list were substituted by phrases or clauses which are easy to understand, while some core words which initiate ideas of the texts would be introduced.



Table 3. The Distribution of Parts of Speech in the Vocabulary Learning Tasks

No
Parts of Speech
Unit 1
Unit 2
Unit 3
Unit 4
Total
Percentage
1
Noun
15
12
11
20
58
0.48
2
Verb
9
7
13
9
38
0.31
3
Adjective
2
4
5
9
20
0.17
4
Preposition
1
0
0
0
1
0.01
5
Adverb
0
1
2
0
3
0.02
6
Conjunction
0
1
0
0
1
0.01



Finally, in each unit, there would be five to twenty words outside the 3000 word list which are introduced in the vocabulary learning tasks. Besides, there are also findings on words outside the 3000 high frequency words, such as subsidy, detective, and smartphone which may not included in every vocabulary learning task because the learners were already understand the meaning of these words from their Indonesian language. Thus, such words in this category may be skipped in the vocabulary learning tasks when they are emerge on new texts.
To summarize, the final reading learning materials were developed by revising 1) the vocabulary used in the texts, 2) the tasks in which the micro skills were developed, 3) the words learned in the vocabulary lists. Therefore, finally the final reading learning materials were expected to be able to develop the desired or needed micro skills, vocabulary and knowledge on the subject matters being discussed.

Conclusion and Recommendation

In reference to the results of the data analysis, this study has successfully achieved the objective of the research. First, it is found that characteristics of the reading learning materials needed by the Grade X students of SMA N 1 Seyegan in the academic year of 2012/2013 include the A4-sized paper-based reading learning  materials which cover topics such as technology, entertainment, love and adventure. Second, as stated in the finding and discussion, the Grade X students and the colleagues who evaluated the learning materials, as well as the English teacher perceive that the developed reading learning materials are appropriate to use. The four units of reading learning materials are found to have appropriate layout and graphic, language, content, activity, language skill, and support. The units of reading learning materials also enable the students to develop their reading skills as well as encourage them in using reading strategies.
Based on the micro skill and vocabulary analysis, however, the developed reading learning materials still have unequally distributed micro skills and words from various parts of speech. Moreover, there are some words in the texts which are not listed in the 3000 high frequency words. These analysis results imply that the learning materials need some revision. However, the final products of this study were already managed to cover all the revisions suggested by the results of the analysis. Thus, the results of this study recommend all material developers and material evaluators to investagate closely their learning materials on its vocabulary (distribution and word frequency class) and the coverage of the micro skills being developed throughout the tasks as these two main points are essentials for the students when they are using the learning materials.


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