Developing Writing Materials by Using Genre-Based Approach for the First Semester of the Tenth Grade Students at SMA Piri 1 Yogyakarta

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to identify the needs of the tenth grade students of SMA PIRI 1 Yogyakarta for the suitable writing materials through the Genre-Based approach and to develop the English writing materials which are suitable with the Genre-Based approach for them. This study was a Research and Development (R&D) study. The subjects consisted of 14 male and 9 female students. This study adapted the R&D model proposed by Borg and Gall (1983) and Masuhara in Tomlinson (1998). The steps of this study were conducting needs analysis, developing the course grid, developing the first draft of the materials, evaluating the materials, and writing the final draft of the materials. There were two types of questionnaires to collect data. The first was needs analysis questionnaire to gather information about students’ needs and interest. The second was expert judgment questionnaire to obtain the data about the appropriateness of the materials. The data of both questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively through descriptive statistics. In addition, there were also qualitative data obtained from the expert in the form of comments and suggestions for the improvement of the materials draft. Based on the results of the needs analysis, the students believed that learning English and having good ability in it was very important. Then, they claimed that their writing ability was intermediate. They also stated that they sometimes wrote in English. Moreover, they wanted some aspects to be included in the materials such as information about grammar, lists of vocabularies, and explanations about genre. In addition, they stated that they found difficulties in choosing vocabularies while learning writing. Considering the students’ learning needs, they preferred to have articles from the internet as the input. Then, they also preferred to have topics related to daily life. For activities, they would like to do grammar tests, identify and translate new vocabularies from texts, organize jumbled words into a sentence. The students stated that they preferred to have discussions while learning and do the tasks individually. This study developed three units of materials. Each unit consisted of five parts namely “Let’s Start”, “Let’s Move”, “Finding Out”, “Let’s Create”, summary and reflection. According to the analysis of the data from the expert judgment, the mean score of all aspects of the three developed units, in the scales of 1-4, was 3.32 which was in the range of 3.25 ≤ 𝑥 ≤ 4 and could be categorized as “Very Good”.