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DESIGNING A SET OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS USING COOPERATIVE INTEGRATED READING AND COMPOSITION CIRC
FOR THE ELEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMA NEGERI 4 YOGYAKARTA
OVERVIEW
This study is entitled “Designing a Set of Instructional Materials Using Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition CIRC for the Eleventh
Grade Students of SMA Negeri 4 Yogyakarta”. This study is aimed to design
materials that are expected to help the eleventh grade students of SMA Negeri 4 Yogyakarta to improve their reading and writing skill through Cooperative
Integrated Reading and Composition CIRC.
A. Background
Reading and writing are two important skills which need to be mastered in order to communicate in English successfully. Why is it so? It is because
communication nowadays is mostly done in written form. We always find reading texts in our daily life; such as letter, announcements, books, articles, stories,
email, fax, advertisements, etc. Unfortunately, written expression is one of the most difficult of the
communication arts to master. It covers reading, spelling, vocabulary, and writing conventions capitalization, punctuation, and organization. The Senior High
School students’ reading and writing performance still falls short of expectations. Most of them say that reading and writing are difficult to learn. National Writing
Project and Carl Nagin 2007: 9 agree that “writing is hard because it is a struggle of thought, feeling, and imagination to find expression clear enough for
the task at hand.” Doing it well means being both a writer and a reader. As a writer, we look through language and try to discover what we mean to say; as a
reader, we look at language with an editor’s eye to be sure that we have found the right words to express the ideas.
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Dealing with the fact, the writer designed a set of instructional materials that integrate reading and writing skills based on Cooperative Integrated Reading
and Composition for the eleventh grade students of SMA Negeri 4 Yogyakarta.
B. Purpose
The purpose of the designed materials is to help students in order to develop their reading and writing skill through narrative. Hopefully, the designed
materials can also help the students to develop other skills in English; listening and speaking through cooperative learning activities given.
C. Content
The designed materials consist of eight units. Each unit is divided into five main parts, namely Let’s Think First, It’s Time to Read, How to Say It, Grammar
Focus and Write Your Story. The time allocation is 2x45 minutes 90 minutes for
each meeting. Those activities are based on Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition CIRC theory. The details of each part are described as follows.
1. Let’s Think First
This is a pre-activity to activate students’ prior knowledge and to introduce the topic. The students mostly were to answer some questions related to the
reading text or to the topic being discussed.
2. It’s Time to Read
This part is the main activity where students did the reading activities such as answering the questions, finding the difficult words from the text, and
discussing the generic structure of the text. In this part, the writer also included Points to Remember
part to explain the things related to the narrative, for example the generic structure and the linguistic features. Moreover, the writer
also attached some information about the kinds of narrative in each unit; it was based on the topic e.g. fable, fairy tale, pourquoi tale, myth, etc.
3. How to Say it?
This is the part in which the students learn the suitable expressions in using language in discussion. The specific expressions or gambits given are very
