Developing Instructional Reading Material for Second Semester Students of English Education Department of Islamic University of Malang

By Fitri Awaliyatush Sholihah

As a part of academic community, students are required to be able to read, think, and argue in certain ways. The students are also required to be able to understand English both in written and spoken. Reading comprehension is the most important skill for them because it can improve their critical thinking skills and it supports the development of other language skills. As stated by Spears (2000, p. 5), he defines reading comprehension as the most important skill in both native and foreign language learning because it demands readers to be actively mark on the paper, working at constructing meaning by using prior knowledge that already exist in the brain. It is not only intellectual meaning may be involved, but also feelings of considerable intensity may be around and emotional attitudes may be profoundly altered trough reading.

Considering that English and reading comprehension play a significant role in developing the quality of human resources, Indonesian government decides that English as the foreign language must be mastered by the students starting from junior high school up to tertiary level education such as university students. As stated above, reading is actually one of the important subjects for English Education Department students of Islamic University of Malang. There are reading I until reading IV that must be taken by the students. This policy is based on curriculum 2008 that has been developed from SK Mendiknas Nomor 232/U/2000 about guidance of arrangement of university curriculum.

However, the problem of reading comprehension is experienced by second semester students of English Education Department of Islamic University of Malang. Many students have low ability in understanding reading passage. Some factors affect students’ success in reading comprehension and one of the important factors that must be considered is the existence of an appropriate instructional reading material.

Instructional materials are kinds of tools of equipment that can effectively help the instructor in the theory teaching classroom or in practical assessment. Allwright (1990, p. 14) states that materials should teach students to learn that they should be resource books for ideas and activities for instruction in learning, and that they should give teachers rationales for what they do. It is clear that the role of instructional reading material is very important in students’ success in reading comprehension. Finally, realizing students’ problem in reading comprehension, it can be inferred that the contents of instructional reading material must be evaluated.

According to the evaluation of the existing instructional reading material which is accommodated in students’ questionnaire, some weaknesses are appeared there. The reading textbook does not stimulate students’ critical thinking because it provides general topics. Some of topics are not appropriate for second semester students socially and psychologically. Furthermore, the textbook does not encourage students to learn more independently because the topics are not interesting for the students. Then, the textbook does not provide various exercises or tasks to measure students’ comprehension when reading the passage. The instruction of the exercises is mostly unclear. The words used in the passage are regarded difficult to understand. Therefore, the students often need dictionary to look for the meaning of the difficult words.

Realizing the problems arisen in the second semester students of English education department on reading comprehension, the researcher wants to solve the problems by developing an appropriate instructional reading material for the students that can attract students’ interest in reading English. So that, it can improve students’ ability in reading comprehension. To achieve that, need analysis is needed to indicate students’ expectation about reading material they expect to read.

It is supported by Richard (200, p. 52), he says that need analysis in language teaching may be used for a number of different purposes, for example to help determine if an existing course adequately addresses the needs of potential students, to determine which students from a group are most in need of training in particular language skills, to identify a gap between what students are able to do and what they need to be able to do, and to collect information about a particular problem learners are experiencing, etc.

Developing instructional reading material is in line with the developing of the text.

            Another important aspect in developing instructional reading material is considering the step in the development. Tomlinson and Masuhara (2004) propose the steps before developing the text, they are collect and /or create texts with the potential for engagement and select the text whether the text likely to engage most of the target learners cognitively and effectively and whether the target learners likely to be able to connect the text to their lives. To sharpen students’ comprehension in reading the passage, testing reading comprehension must be developed in this development. There are several ways of testing reading comprehension proposed by Richard (2001), they are as follows: matching test, true/false reading test, multiple-choice test, completion items, rearrangement items, cloze procedure, open-ended and miscellaneous items, and cursory reading. In this study, the researcher not only create the textbook which is consisted of some passage completed by some exercises, but the researcher also gives the activities including group or pair work in each units or topics to make the students more active and interesting while understanding the reading passage.