The Role of Instructional Materials

1 Pre-communicative Activities The pre-communicative activities are the activities in which the learners are being trained in the part-skills of communication rather than practicing the total skill to be acquired. In the pre-communicative activities, the learners practice certain language forms and functions, which lead to communicative work. Littlewood 1981: 89 states that the aim of pre-communicative activities is to give learners fluent control over linguistic forms with the main criterion for success, whether the learners produce acceptable language. 2 Communicative Activities Communicative activities are the activities in which the learners activate and integrate their pre-communicative activities of knowledge and skills, in order to use them for the communication of meanings Littlewood, 1981: 86. There are two main categories in communicative activities proposed by Littlewood 1981: 20, namely functional communication activities and social interaction activities. The main purpose of the functional activities is that learners are located in a circumstance where she or he has to perform a task by communicating the best she or he with some resources he or she has available. In the social interaction activities, the learners are also motivated to pay greater attention of the social context where the interaction takes place. 3 Characteristic of Communicative Activities According to Harmer 1991: 50 there are six characteristics of communicative activities. They are: 1 a desire to communicate, 2 a communicative purpose, 3 context not form, 4 variety of language, 5 no teacher intervention, 6 and no materials control. A desire to communicate means in communicative activities, the students should have a desire to communicate or want to be involved in communication; otherwise, the activities will not be effective. Here, the motivation of the students to be involved in the communication is the major factor needed. On the other hand, the teacher may help the students to encourage their motivation by providing interesting and motivating activities in the learning process. This first characteristic could be found in the extracurricular English Club students of SMP Kanisius Pakem Yogyakarta . It is showed that they were interested and motivated joining this course. Besides, they were also motivated to be able to communicate by speaking English. A communicative purpose means the students should have some kinds of communicative purpose when they use the language. In other words, they should use the language some way to achieve an objective, and this objective purpose should be the most important part of the communication. Here, the students need something to be achieved to motivate them in the learning process. In this study, the communicative purposes could be seen in the learning objectives stated in every unit of the designed materials. Context not form means after students have a communicative purpose, their attention in learning a language should be centered on the context. Context is defined as the text or speech that comes immediately before and after a particular phrase or piece of text and helps to explain its meaning Cambridge Advance Learners Dictionary 3 rd edition. In other word, they should pay attention to the context of what is being said or written and not the language form that is being used. Here, delivering and accepting the meaning of the language based on the context is the most important thing. Asking students to memorize the grammar and sentence is not recommended in the teaching learning process. In the designed materials, the researcher provides some expressions to be used in the communication. These expressions are the guidance to help the students while speaking English. These are not to be memorized. The most important is students could deliver meaning in the communication. The phrases, words, and sentences students used are based on the context of communication. Variety of language provides the students with comfortable means as the students can use their language skill to express their minds rather than use just one grammatical construction. The teacher gives opportunity to the students to explore their knowledge to the variety of language. Students will not memorize one pattern of grammatical construction to