Features on the Designed Material
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structures, provide them with vocabulary list related to the text being read and offer them with reading exercises in order to support their reading comprehension.
In the last activity, post-reading activity, the students were given material which aimed to introduce them to reading strategies. It was completed with short
explanations and exercises to check their understanding of the material given. The feature was reflected what has been stated by the teacher in the interview that it
was important to introduce the students to the text structure so they could know at a glance what they are going to read, and they could predict also what they are
going to learn Appendix 131. The next feature was vocabulary. In this feature, the main core was the
presentation of vocabulary list taken from the text being discussed and presented in the previous feature. As stated by Anderson as cited by Nunan, 2003, it is
important to build a strong vocabulary base so the students would be able to understand the text easily. Teaching reading strategies to the students also became
another important point to consider. The consideration for adapting this principle was the sooner the teacher introduces the students to the reading strategies, the
better the result will be. It was in line with Anderson’s Teaching Reading Principles that the students should be encouraged to transform their reading
strategies into skills after they learn the rea ding strategies. To ease the students’
process in understanding text, teaching text structures was the thing that the teacher needed to consider also. This principle was adapted for it would be very
beneficial both for the students and the teacher. The students could understand the text better by recognizing the text structures while the teacher would contribute
the step to increase the students’ reading mastery. Moreover, teaching vocabulary
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building for the students was one of the effective efforts that could be done by the teachers in improving the students’ reading mastery. By building the vocabulary
of related topics simultaneously, the students’ understanding of the topics being read in the text hopefully will show improvement. Statistics also showed that
57.7 of the respondents said that list of vocabulary was given by the teacher to help them understanding the text. Thus, it strengthens the function of this feature.
Exercises were the next feature that the students could find in the designed material. It consisted of all material from each topic provided in the designed
material. This feature was reflected the theories of teaching reading principles proposed by Farrell. The principles being adapted were the principle to teach
fluency and comprehension, to teach reading strategies, to teach text structures, and to teach vocabulary building. Principle to teach fluency and comprehension
was selected to be adapted due to the fact that the students need to be introduced to learn reading fluency to support their reading comprehension. As what had
been explained in Chapter 2 that by having a better reading fluency, the students have the chance to comprehend the text and their reading mastery will be
automatically increased. From the questionnaire of preliminary data gathering, 88.5 of the total respondents said that the teacher gave them reading
comprehension in the form of exercises to help them understanding the text better. The form of exercises varied, starting from matching, multiple choices, and cloze
test. Every correct answer from the students will earn points and will be calculated and showed in the screen when the students had finished working on the
exercises. Thus, feedback was also given through simple positive comment when the answer was correct and encouragement when the answer was incorrect.
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Reading skills were provided as a feature to introduce some reading skills to the students. There were three reading skills presented in this feature, namely
finding specific information, picturing the general idea of the text, and finding the main idea of the text. The discussion for each topic was completed with short
description, supporting videos and also exercises to check the students’ understanding towards the topic being discussed. Reading skills were not listed in
the syllabus for the seven grade students, yet it will be the things that they need most later. The students were not familiar with the reading skills as stated by the
teacher in Appendix 133, 5, 7. However, it becomes the strong reason to have the feature in the designed material. It was aimed to make the students know more
and able to use it. To close the reading lesson, a vocabulary game was presented under a
feature named puzzle. The exercises were all in the form of puzzle or crossword. The questions were taken from the vocabulary list that the students had in the
previous feature . It was aimed to build the students’ vocabulary base which was
presented in a very interesting way. This feature was the follow up activity for the third feature, named vocabulary.
The designed material was classified into Generic Software Applications according to type of CALL proposed by Davies et.al. 2004. Generic Software
Applications were designed for the general use that could be very useful for the teaching learning process. The designed material was classified into this type
because most of the material were presented using offline web browser. The supporting browsers for the designed material were Chrome, Firefox. Thus, the
designed material could be accessed using computers with Linux or Windows for
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the Operating System. For Windows Operating System, the supporting version was Windows XP at the least.
The material is designed to answer the problem formulation stated in Chapter I. The material is designed based on the theory of reading comprehension,
teaching reading, and CALL which has adjusted to the students’ need in learning reading. The contribution of the material
to enhance the students’ reading skill lies on the feedback given for the material and from the users
’ experience. Moreover, the improvement of students’ reading skills will not in the form of statistics
because there is no treatment implemented in the study.