Background of the Study

teaching and learning process, including in the teaching and learning of reading. The learning materials help the teachers to deliver the instruction and information to the students and facilitate the students to understand the instruction given by the teachers. There are many kinds of learning materials that can be used to teach reading, e.g. magazines, newspapers, charts, images and some technological aids. By considering that learning materials are significant to make the process of teaching reading run well and achieve the goals, the teachers have to design the learning materials carefully. In relation to learning materials, teachers tend to use textbooks or other printed materials to teach reading. They consider the textbooks as the main materials and other materials which are from the internet, magazines, newspapers as the additional ones. Nowadays, there are many textbooks that are well-designed and the teachers can use them to teach reading to their students, yet the teaching and learning process of reading will be just a series of monotonous activities such as reading a text and answering the questions. The consequence is that the students will get bored easily. Eventually, it can be concluded that teaching reading by using textbooks is not enough. That is why teachers need more than textbooks or printed materials to assure that the teaching and learning process of reading runs well and the students are engaged. The teachers should innovate the learning materials and media. Along with the innovative theories and improvements in information and technology, the learning media used in the teaching and learning process change. In this modern era, learning media are not only chalk, blackboard, video player and tape recorder. There are also personal computers PCs, laptops, LCD projectors and internet which can facilitate the teaching and learning process. Teachers can combine some media such as texts, pictures and videos into a package. A package of some media called multimedia is now available. The multimedia contains more interactive features than printed materials. The availability of multimedia challenges the teachers to utilize it appropriately based on the learning needs. In the English teaching and learning process, the use of multimedia as teaching media undoubtedly helps the students to be autonomous learners and makes the teaching and learning process a learner-centered process since the interactive features in the multimedia give the students an opportunity to study independently. Furthermore, the elements of multimedia such as videos, recordings and pictures can show the students the models of target language uses. However, there is a problem in the implementation of interactive multimedia in the English teaching and learning process. As stated earlier, most of the teachers tend to use printed materials rather than interactive multimedia, especially in reading. As a consequence, the students get bored easily. In addition, teachers who use multimedia in their teaching often find some difficulties in finding the appropriate learning sources. Even though many interactive multimedia sources can be found easily, those which fulfil the requirements of national standard of competencies are still limited. Considering those issues, this study is to find a solution in order to facilitate the students in learning the reading skill, especially descriptive text reading. The focus of this study is developing appropriate interactive multimedia for teaching descriptive text reading which can fulfil requirements of national standard of competencies.

B. The Identification of the Problems

Based on the background of the study, the researcher identified some main problems in relation to the teaching and learning process of reading, especially descriptive text reading. The problems are analysed and then elaborated in this section. The first problem is related to the material sources used by the teachers. As stated in the previous sub-chapter, most of the English teachers’ learning material sources are just from textbooks or other printed materials. The teachers give a text to the students and ask them to read the text and then do the tasks based on the instruction. The tasks are easily predicted by them and therefore their curiosity is not well-developed. Those activities will make them easily get bored since the learning materials are monotonous. The second problem is about media. The media used by the teachers to deliver the material such as whiteboard and board markers do not help the students much in reading activities. New technologies such as PCs, laptops and LCD projectors are rarely used by the teachers to gain students’ motivation to read. The third problem is about the time allocation. Textbooks contain some interesting activities in order to make the students understand about the material, in this case descriptive text. However, the teachers are unable to teach all of the activities because of the limitation of the time. The time allocation for English in junior high school that the researcher has observed is just forty minutes in a meeting and there will be four meetings in a week. In those meetings, the teacher should deliver the materials and give the test including the main and remedial test. Therefore, the time is very limited for the teachers to deliver all of the activities in the textbooks. The last problem is about the availability of the interactive multimedia sources. Actually, there are many interactive multimedia sources available in the CD rentals or bookstores, but the one that fulfil the national standard requirement is rarely found. It is found that the standardized textbooks are more easily found than the standardized interactive multimedia. That is one of the reason of some teachers not to use the interactive multimedia.

C. The Delimitation of the Problems

This study focuses on developing interactive multimedia for teaching reading descriptive text. The study is designed for seventh grade students at SMPN 6 Yogyakarta. The researcher focuses on developing interactive multimedia for teaching reading descriptive text for seventh grade students at SMPN 6 Yogyakarta because she believes that interactive multimedia give the contributions in helping the teachers to deliver descriptive text materials.

D. Formulation of the Problems

Based on the background of the study, identification of the problem and delimitation of the problem, the research problems can be formulated as follows. 1. What are the needs of Grade VII students of SMPN 6 Yogyakarta in term of learning descriptive text reading? 2. What are the characteristic of appropriate interactive learning multimedia that can be used to support the teaching and learning process of descriptive text reading? 3. What is the appropriate interactive learning multimedia for teaching descriptive text reading to Grade VII students of SMPN 6 Yogyakarta?

E. Objectives of the Research

Based on the delimitation and formulation of problem above, the objectives of this research are: 1. to find out the needs of Grade VII students of SMPN 6 Yogyakarta in terms of learning descriptive text reading. 2. to find out the characteristic of appropriate interactive learning multimedia that can be used to support the teaching and learning process of descriptive text reading. 3. to develop the appropriate interactive learning multimedia for teaching descriptive text reading to Grade VII students of SMPN 6 Yogyakarta