6. It must contain quality of practice materials. It must have
various exercises from guided to free, clarity of directions, active participation of the students, grammatical and other
linguistic explanation, and review materials. 7.
It is sequenced. It can be by grammatical structure, by skills, by situations, or by some combinations.
8. It pays attention to the word and the word study. It provides a
list of words and strategies for word analysis. 9.
It should provide general sociolinguistic factors. A textbook must provide information on variety of languages and cultural
contents. 10. It must have attractive, usable, and durable layout. It includes
the clarity of typesetting, use of special notation phonetic symbols, stressintonation marking, etc., quality and clarity of
illustrations, size of the book and binding, table of contents, and chapter headings.
11. It must have accompanying materials. It can be in the forms of workbooks, tapes-audio andor video, posters, flash cards, etc.
12. It must provide a useful teacher’s guide. It must guide the
teacher in the teaching and learning process. The explanations above show us the criteria of appropriate materials to
be used in the teaching learning process. In short, the materials should provide the students with the real-world activities to rehearse the students
with the real communication in their future work-place. The materials also should provide new knowledge beyond the students’ life to give them
experiences to their workplace. For Avionic Maintenance and Repair Department, the new knowledge can be in the form of highly specialized
technical phraseology which has been acknowledged internationally. Through this information, the students can recognize the terms which are
used in their work-place.
b. Steps in Designing Materials
There are five general process of designing learning material, as proposed by Tomlinson 1998: 97 below.
a. Identification Firstly, a material developer identifies what is needed by the
learners. Here, the material developer also identifies what problem to be solved by creation of the materials.
b. Exploration After the material developer identifies the learners’ need, then the
next step is exploring the area of need or problems in terms of language, meanings, functions, skills, etc.
c. Contextual Realization Then, the material developer starts writing the materials by finding
suitable ideas, contexts, or texts with which to work. d. Pedagogical Realization
In this step, the material developer finds appropriate exercises and
activities and the writing of appropriate instructions for use. e. Physical Production
Finally, the material developer begins to design material, involving considerations of layout, type size, visuals, reproduction, etc.
In addition, there are five steps in designing materials as proposed by Masuhara in Tomlinson 1998: 247. Those steps are explained as follows.
1. Needs analysis The very first thing a material developer should do before
starting to design materials is collecting information related to the materials which is needed by the teacher and the learners in the
classroom. 2. Goals and Objectives
After conducting needs analysis, the material developer determines the goals and objectives of the materials.
3. Syllabus design In this stage, the material developer starts designing syllabus
which is based on the curriculum and the result of needs analysis. The syllabus, then, becomes a basic for the material which will be
arranged. 4. MethodologyMaterials
After that, the material developer starts designing the learning materials. The material developer also finds out the teaching
method which is can be implemented through the teaching
materials. 5. Testing and evaluation
Lastly, the material developers then conducted a try out. During the try out session, the material developer also obtains feedback
from the teacher and the students as a basic of evaluation in order to improve the material.
c. Tasks in Materials Development
Richards and Nunan 1990: 10 define task as a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or
interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. From this definition, a task is a part of
classroom activity which requires learners to be active participants in it while they are focusing on the meaning of the language itself.
Before designing a task or a learning material, it is important for a teacher or a material developer to know the components of a task. The
component of a task is proposed by Richards and Nunan 1990: 48 as shown in a figure below.
Figure 1: The Component of a Task
a. Goals Goals are the vague general intentions behind any given
learning task. They provide a point of contact between the task and the broader curriculum. Goals may relate to a range of general
outcomes communicative, affective, or cognitive or may directly describe teacher or learner behavior. It can be concluded that
besides provide a relation between the task and the curriculum, goals also related to a range of general outcomes or related to the
description of teachers or learners behavior. b. Input
Input refers to the data that form the point of departure for the task. Input for communicative tasks can be derived from a wide
range of sources. The sources of an input can be taken from articles for newspapers, magazines, and journals, radio and
television scripts, news stories and reports, research reports, short stories, press releases, and so on. From that explanation, it can be
concluded that input is the data from any sources which can be used to develop any learning media or learning activities in order
to help the students learn language effectively. c. Activities
Activities specify what learners will actually do with the input which forms the point of departure for the learning task.
There are three principal learning activities; those are information – gap activity; that is an activity of transferring given information
from one person to another, or from one form to another, or from
one place to another. One example is pair work in which each member of the pair has a part of the total information for example
an incomplete picture and attempts to convey it verbally to the other.
The next is reasoning – gap activity, which is an activity of
deriving some new information from given information through processes of inference, deduction, practical reasoning, or a
perception of relationships or patterns. One example is working out a teacher’s timetable on the basis of given class timetables, and
the last is opinion – gap activity, which involves identifying and
articulating a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in response to a given situation, for example like a story completion. The
activity may involve using factual information and formulating arguments to justify one’s opinion, but there is no objective
procedure for demonstrating outcomes as right or wrong, and no reason to expect the same outcome from different individuals or
on different occasions. Other types of task activities are proposed by Pattison in
Richards and Nunan 1990: 68, those are questions and answers, which based on the notion of creating an information gap by
letting learners to make a personal and secret choice from a list of language items which all fit into a given frame, dialogues and role
– plays, which can be wholly scripted or wholly improvised.
