DEVELOPING A STUDENT WRITING WORKBOOK USING MAGAZINE-DESIGNING TASKS FOR THE SEVENTH GRADE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

There were three major aims of this research. The first one was to find the target needs of the seventh grade students in learning writing in English. The second was to find the learning needs of the seventh grade students in learning writing in English. The last was to develop the suitable tasks for the student’s writing workbook for the seventh grade. This research employed Research and Development (R & D) approach. The subjects of this research were the seventh grade students of SMP N 4 Ngaglik, Yogyakarta. This research was conducted by following Borg and Gall’s model (1983) and Masuhara’s model in Tomlinson (1998) with some modifications. The steps of this research were conducting needs analysis, designing the course grid, developing the first draft of the materials, asking for expert judgment, revising the product and writing the final draft of the materials. There were two types of questionnaire used in collecting the data. The first was needs analysis questionnaire which was intended to find out the target needs and the learning needs of the students. It was filled by the students as the subject of the study. The second questionnaire was the expert judgment questionnaire. It was intended to assess the appropriateness of the developed materials and being filled by the expert. The data of both questionnaires were analyzed through descriptive statistics. The result of the needs analysis showed that the students needed a writing workbook as supplementary materials. Three units of writing workbook materials based on 2006 Curriculum (School-based Curriculum) using magazine-design task as the final project were developed in this research. The unit design used the four stages of genre-based approach as being mentioned by Feez and Joyce in Richards (2006). Each unit had eight main parts: get ready (Building Knowledge of Field), find out (Modelling of Text), move further (Joint Construction of the Text), try to do it (Independent Construction of the Text), homework, reflection, fun zone, and my magazine. The input of the materials was in the form of written texts, pictures, and explanation. Based on the results of the expert judgment, the mean score of the whole aspects of the developed materials was 3.32 which was in the range of 3.25 ≤x ≤4, and categorized as “Very Good”. As a result, the student writing workbook using magazine-design task was considered appropriate for the seventh grade students.