DEVELOPING ENGLISH READING MATERIALS FOR THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS OF MTs AL-HAMID BANJARMASIN

Sari

Reading is one of the skill that important to learn. By reading, students will get new knowledge from books, newspaper, magazine, even social media. In this era, many students have problems in understanding and confuse to learn reading text. To reach the goal of reading lesson, the students need the English reading material which are relevant. Good materials are needed in this research. It can be effort for the students to makes their reading ability better. By developing good materials, students will expected to be more active in the learning process and make the students interested in the reading lesson.
This design of this research is Research and Development (R&D). The participants were the eighth grade students of MTs Al-Hamid. This research adapted the model from Dick and Carey with some modification. The steps in the modified research procedures were conducting the needs analysis, writing the course grid, developing the materials, getting the expert judgment, and writing the final draft of the materials. There were two types of data: the quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data were the students’ needs analysis and the expert judgment which were collected by using questionnaires, while the qualitative data were the expert opinion about the materials.
The result of needs analysis shows that the students preferred to communicate in daily activity, and also in the intermediate level. Besides, the students have difficulties in recognizing particular meaning of the text. The students preferred to have topic about holiday and family. Meanwhile, the length of the text are about 100 – 150 words. Most of students want the activity of answering optional question. The students preferred reading in the classroom and do the activity individually. The students want the teacher to guide and correct student’s work while teaching and learning. Meanwhile the students preferred to be active learner. The result from expert judgment shows that the main value from each chapters of the appropriateness of content is 4, appropriateness of language is 4, and appropriateness of graphic is 4. All of those values are in range ≥ 3.28 that means “very good”. Meanwhile, the main value of the appropriateness of presentation is 3.5 and in the range ≥ 3.28 that means “very good”. Based on the result, the materials categorized appropriate.