Features on the Designed Material

110 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 111 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. 112 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 113 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.

2. Presentation of the Designed Material

The material designed consisted of four main pages, namely home, how to use, let’s do it and about us. Home covered the short description of the whole reading material while how to use elaborated the way how to use the material. It gave a concise explanation for each feature provided in the learning material. The map consisted of a map to access each feature of the learning material. The map concept was selected because of its interesting concept that hopefully could attract students’ attention. The last page, about us, provided the short explanation of the designer of the designed material. The complete user interface design of the material was presented in Appendix 26. 114 Figure 4.5. Sample of Warming Up Exercise 3. Administering the Designed Material The basic idea of the designed material was providing an alternative of learning material for the students which had different functionality compared to text book. The material were designed in semi structured way but the focus was on the presentation of the three main activities of reading process which was conveyed in a very pleasant and interesting way. The semi structured part in the designed material was in the flexibility of selecting which exercise to work on first in the exercises section. For the whole topics presented in the designed material, the exercises section covers all exercises for the whole learning material. The students could select one of the exercises for each topic to do first. In order to classify the exercises, a clear naming for the each exercise was provided. By doing that, students could select which exercise from which topic that they want to work on first. Based on the feedbacks from the experts, it would be better to make the design not a hundred percent flexible for the students to access. Giving concise description and explanation of what they have to do with the learning material. 115 The previous instruction in the designed material was not really clear in giving the direction to the students. The revision should include the clear instruction for each section and which one that is flexible for them to select. The material was designed to be supporting material for the students in learning reading especially for the seventh grade students. The material will be given in the class only during the English subject hours with consideration that not all students might have a set of computer or laptop at home to do the reading material. If the reading material were given as homework, it was afraid that those who do not have computer at home would not be able to work on it. While at school, the students could access it in computer laboratory during the English subject hours scheduled by the teacher. By doing so, each student has equal chance to learn and get the benefit from the computer based reading material and it is hoped could support and increase the students’ reading mastery. In administering the reading class using computer based reading material, the teacher acted as facilitator who just explained what the students should do with the reading material. The teacher needed to give detail yet concise description of the learning material so the students could get the whole picture of the material they were going to work on. The autonomous learning process started when the students work on the learning material by themselves, maximizing the function of the instructions and minimizing to involve the teacher’s help in their learning process. One of the indicators that the autonomous initiation process worked in successful way was the scores gained by the students for the exercises section. If they could gain good scores, it could be concluded that they understand