Speaking Description of Skills Aspect
99 Even In Unit III on page 53, there is a reading passage discussing global
warming which
is very
authentic since
it is
taken from
http:au.answers.yahoo.com. This passage is presented in a form that is same as the original format. It was shown on Figure 4.23.
Figure 4.23 Example of different reading passage format
The next criterion is about the suit of the associated activities for students’
level and interests. The activities following reading activities that can be found in this textbook are answering multiple choice questions, deciding whether some
statements are true or false based on the passage and then correcting the false statement, answering WH questions, rearranging jumbled paragraphs, completing
100 a chart or table based on information found in the passage, giving opinion towards
the content of the passage, making or completing summary, and filling the blanks. This textbook provides quite various reading activities that are basically
interesting for the learners. This textbook also fulfilled criterion of providing sufficient reading
material. There are various reading passages in each unit. There are at least three reading passages in each unit. Unit II, Unit IV, and Unit VIII provides three
reading passages. Unit I, Unit VI and Unit VII provides four reading passages. Five reading passages can be found in Unit III, Unit V and Unit X, while Unit IX
has six reading passages. Moreover, there are two unit reviews after five units. In this each unit review there are three passages which are followed by multiple
choice questions. Each passage represents the type of text that has been learned in a semester.
2 Weaknesses
The criterion of whether the reading activitiestasks in the textbook appropriate with genre based principles or not was not fulfilled. Reading activities
in written cycle can be functioned as the building of the field and modeling stage. In these stages the students try to recognize the characteristic of a particular text.
For example, in the Unit I of this textbook, the focused material is report text. The written cycle of Unit I in this book is started from page 12 until page 16 under
Read and Write Part. Started from Task 18 on page 12, there is a passage titled Gawai Dayak. Then, the students are asked to decide whether the statements
provided are true or false with the reason why. In Task 19, the students learn
101 about passive and active sentences. In Task 20, the students practice to change ten
active sentences into passive voice form. Then, in Task 21 there was a passage about Thanksgiving Day and in Task 22 the students are asked to work in pairs to
match some words on the passage with their meanings. After that, in Task 23, there is explanation about the part and common grammatical patterns of a report
text. Then, Task 24, 25 and 26 are exercises to write. In these tasks, the students are asked to write a report text with or without guiding information. In this written
cycle, the Task 18 should become the activity that accommodates the first stage of teaching learning cycle, building knowledge of the field. However, the activity in
Task 18 which asks the students to decide whether the statements are true or false is not really appropriate. Feez and Joyce 2002 state that in building knowledge
of the field stage, the students are introduced to the social context of an authentic model. They are also expected to explore the social purposes. This task is just
reading comprehension activity. Even if Task 21 and 23 can accommodate modeling stage, this cycle is still lack of building knowledge of the field.