The Syllabus of English Subject for Class VIII

37 materials to draw students’ attention to learn. Second, the researcher had to create activities that could increase the students’ mastery of grammar and vocabulary. 2 The Second Teacher The researcher conducted the interview with the second teacher on Wednesday, 29 th April 2016. This interview aimed to get the information dealing with the level of difficulty in designing materials, methods used, and activities in the class. Furthermore, the researcher also got the information about the situation of the class, and the characteristics of the students. From this interview, the researcher found out the information dealing with the level of difficulty in designing materials. The teacher stated that in designing materials for the students class VIII, she always tried to make them simple to be learnt since most of the students in this class did not have English basic knowledge and motivation to learn English. Nevertheless, she found that most students were difficult to follow the learning process. After being reflected, she realized that during the teaching at this class, she merely used the conventional approach. Consequently, the classroom sometimes could not be managed well. Therefore, she suggested that the teachers had to be innovative when teaching the classes. In this interview, the researcher also got the information related to the activities in the classes. The teacher used three big activities. There were pre- activity, main activity, and post-activity. While for the method used, the teacher stated that she often used conventional method. In this case, she became the center of the learning process. The percentage when she talked was higher than the students’. Dealing with the characteristic of the students, the teacher said that PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 38 actually, the English ability of the students of this class was still low. She gave the example from the writing aspect. When the students were given chances to make sentences, there would be many grammatical errors in the sentences. In the interview, the researcher also got the information saying that most of the students in class VIII were not happy if there were many tasks given and if they felt the tasks were difficult for them. Consequently, they would not do the task. Therefore, the teacher suggested to the researcher to make simple instructional activities. The most important here was that they could enjoy work on them and learn something from the learning. From the interview above, the researcher got two important aspects to design the materials. First, the researcher had to create interesting and various activities so that the students were not bored. Second, the researcher should design simple instructional activities that were easy to follow.

B. Planning

The second step after collecting information was planning. In this step, the researcher used the data from research and information collecting step as the basic. There were four parts in this step. They were defining skills, stating objectives, determining course sequence, and small scale feasibility testing.

1. Defining Skills

In this research, the researcher focused on writing skill which is a part of language basic skills. It was chosen since the ability of the eighth-grade students of SMPN 15 to write good English sentences was fairly poor. Furthermore, the writing PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI