Developing Interactive Multimedia for Learning Descriptive Text Writing for Grade Vii Students of SMPN 4 Wates

Abstract

Abstract: The objectives of the research were 1) to describe the target and learning needs of Grade VII students of SMPN 4 Wates in terms of the learning of English writing, and 2) to develop the appropriate interactive multimedia for learning descriptive text writing for Grade VII students of SMPN 4 Wates. This was a Research and Development (R & D) study. The procedure of the research followed the multimedia instructional design process proposed by Lee & Owens (2004) with some modifications. The modified model consisted of four main parts: 1) analysis, 2) design, 3) development, and 4) evaluation. The results of the needs analysis revealed that students’ goal in learning English were to be able to communicate in English in both spoken and written form in daily life. The students’ necessities in writing English were to produce acceptable sentences with acceptable grammar and to produce the text by considering the social purpose, the generic structure, and the linguistic features of the text. They wanted to describe public figure, mammals, and recreation places in the learning to write descriptive texts. There were three writing activities: (1) arranging jumbled words into good and meaningful sentence, (2) completing missing words in a text, and (3) writing a text based on the picture that students wanted to be included in the materials. The appropriate interactive multimedia consist of four list menu: about, user guide, units and references. The results of the materials and media evaluation showed that the content and the media of the interactive multimedia fitted into “very good” category as the mean value of all content aspects was 4.3 and the mean value of all media aspects was 4.4, in a range of the very good category, namely .