Designing English Reading Materials as a Supplementary Book for the Seventh Grade Students of SMP Aloysius Denggung in the First Semester

Abstract

The objectives of this research were to gain information related to the students’ needs to be able to design suitable English reading materials for the seventh grade students at SMP Aloysius Denggung, Yogyakarta and to develop suitable English reading materials as a supplementary book for the seventh grade students at SMP Aloysius Denggung. This study was a Research and Development (R&D) study. This study was conducted at SMP Aloysius Denggung. The subjects consisted of 10 male students and 12 female students as the respondents. This study combined the materials development model purposed by Borg and Gall (1983) and Masuhara in Tomlinson (1988). The steps of doing this study were conducting needs analysis, designing the course grid, designing the first draft of the materials, having the expert judgment evaluate the materials and developing the final draft of the materials. To gather the data, there were two types of questionnaire. The first was needs analysis questionnaire to collect information related to the students’ needs, wants and lacks. The second was the expert judgment questionnaire to obtain the data related to the appropriateness of the developed materials. The data of both of the questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively through descriptive statistics. In addition, there were also qualitative data gained from the open ended questions in the needs analysis questionnaire and the expert’s suggestions. Based on the result of the needs analysis, the materials were further developed. There were 3 units in the learning materials. The first unit was about self-introduction. The second unit was about command and prohibition expressions and the last unit was about announcement texts. Each unit consisted of six parts namely “Let’s Begin”, “Go Further”, “One Step Closer”, “Now, You’re Ready”, “Vocabulary Lists” and “Reflection”. According to the analysis of the data from the expert judgment, the mean score of all aspects of the developed materials in the scale of 1-4 was 3.12 which was in the range of 2.25≤ 𝑥 ≤3.24 and could be categorized as “Good”.