Planning Process of Developing the Iconic Model

87 were done simultaneously with the development of the application using App Inventor. The processes of developing the application were elaborated as follows. a. Developing the Materials The materials included in the application were adjusted with the topics selected from the syllabus. The researcher browsed the audio materials from the internet. The audios were mostly taken from www.youtube.com and www.twominenglish.com. The reason why taking the audios from the internet instead of doing recording on her own was because of the authenticity. The audios taken from the internet were more native-like. After selecting the necessary materials, the researcher developed the exercises. The exercises were in the forms of multiple choice, true-false, and filling blanks tasks. Regarding with the fun materials, there were songs, stories, and poems to be included in the application. As suggested by Harmer 2002, music has a powerful stimulus to engage learners because it can arouse their emotions and can combine between learning and leisure activity. Besides, it can introduce some grammar patterns and increase learners’ vocabulary. Those aspects became considerations to put some pieces of musics in the application. b. Developing a Storyboard and a Flowchart The theoretical model of the Android application was developed by creating a storyboard and a flowchart. They helped the researcher in drawing the connection among each of the components in the application. The users could access the application in their mobile phones by installing FLAP.apk into their devices. The more detailed presentation about the storyboard and the flowchart can be seen in 88 Appendix 3. Meanwhile, the parts and the description of contents for each part are presented in the following table. Table 4.8. FLAP and Its Content Description Fun Listening Android Application FLAP Screen and Content Home  This screen contains the title of the application, a picture of students of SMAN 1 Depok Sleman, Help button, and Go button.  The buttons will lead to Help screen and Menu screen. Help  This screen contains four sections, namely Overview, Manual, Resource, and Contact Info.  Help menu provides description about the application and the functions of each button in the application. Menu  The Main Menu contained four main parts of the application, i.e. Focus, Fun, Final, and Forum. Unit  This screen presents a list of topics taken from the syllabus for Senior High School Grade X. Unit Preview  This screen provides a description about the topics that will be learnt and the objectives of the unit. Focus  This screen consists of three sections, namely Listen, Practice, and Review. Listen  Listen screen contains some listening materials in the form of audios. The transcription is also provided. Practice  Practice screen contains listening exercises in the form of multiple choice, true-false, and filling blanks.  After completing the exercises, the feedback and score will be given.  The exercises aim to check students’ understanding about particular topics. Review  Review contains a list of vocabulary or expressions.  There are Text to Speech and Speech Recognizer features in this section.  Those features aim to develop students’ listening and pronunciation skills. Fun  This screen contains some fun listening materials, like songs, stories, and poems in the forms of filling blank exercises.  Hints are provided to help students understand the missing words. continued 89 continued Fun Listening Android Application FLAP Screen and Content Songs  There are three songs in this section in the forms of missing lyrics exercises.  Students can check the number of correct and incorrect answers. Stories  There are three stories in this section in the forms of filling blank exercises.  Students can check the number of correct and incorrect answers. Poems  There are three poems in this section in the forms of filling blank exercises.  Students can check the number of correct and incorrect answers. Final  This screen contains some listening tests which are packaged like those in the National Examination.  There are four parts of listening tests which have different instructions, objectives, and types of audios and questions.  There are 20 questions in the whole test.  The feedback and score for each part are also given after completing the test. Forum  This screen provides a facility for students to communicate with their friends or teachers via social media. There are three primary buttons which appear on most screens in the application, namely Home button, Menu button, and Quit button. Home button enables the users to go back to the homescreen. Then, menu button will lead to the menu screen, while Quit button will enable the users to exit the application anytime. c. Developing the Application Using App Inventor App Inventor is an online Android development program which is designed for people who have little experiences of programming. It can be accessed from ai2.appinventor.mit.edu. To deal with App Inventor, firstly the developer should understand some components of a mobile application, namely visual components, non-visual components, events, behaviours, event-handlers, and variables Penta, n.d.. In this research, the researcher worked by herself in developing the Android 90 application, thus many difficulties and challenges were found during the process of developing FLAP. In creating an Android application using App Inventor, a developer needs to work with the Designer components and the Blocks components. The Designer components consists of some elements that will be inserted in the application, such as button, label, picture, textbox, video, sound, etc, while the Blocks components consist of some behaviours to those elements. The materials that had been selected were adjusted with file formats which could be accepted by App Inventor. For instance, the image types were in JPG or PNG format, while GIF images animation images did not work well in this software. Additionally, the audio files should be adjusted with the App Inventor acceptable file size. The maximum size of the media that can be uploaded in the App Inventor is only 5 MB. If the total file size is more than 5 MB, there will be a warning as shown in the following. Figure 4.1. The Warning of the Failed Building Project To overcome this problem, the researcher then tried to compress the file and convert it into an AAC Advanced Audio Coding audio file format. Compared to MP3 file, AAC file has the smaller size. However, as the consequence, the quality of the audios was not good enough. There were 55 audios which were successfully uploaded in the application. There are some limitations of this Android development program. First, to develop an Android Application using App Inventor needs stable internet