stories to promote the students’ values of life, such as story telling, singing a song, answering questions from the story, games, making handicraft, discussion, and
playing drama. Those techniques are meant to help the students practice the language skills, and to support the teaching-learning activities to motivate students
and to make the students enjoy their learning activities and also to promote the students’ values of life.
Teaching children is very different from teaching adults. They frequently change their mood every other minute and they are unlikely to be interested in
reading stories by themselves because they have low ability in reading and writing. Thus, educators should create a variety of techniques in teaching English, which are
interesting and enjoyable for elementary children. According to Petty, et al. 1989: 85 young children learn a language best when they have meaningful experiences
with it. The variation of techniques also means to help the teachers to explain and to practice both language skills and language elements. Moreover, through reading
short stories the students can learn new words faster by looking for the pictures. By presenting the pictures in the given story, the students are assisted to understand the
story and the meaning of the words as well as how to use those words correctly.
B. Problem Identification
There are some English materials which give less attention to students’ self- development especially to promote their values of life. Values of life must be taught
as soon as possible in the child’s life experiences to prepare the student for the next level.
The sixth grade of elementary school students are still beginners in learning English. It will be hard for the students to master language skills if the teacher does
not giving interesting materials. Using short stories can provide students’ interests. Using short stories the students are helped to memorise not only language skills but
also the value taught through the stories. It is not easy to teach values of life while teaching language skills at the same
time. The teachers need strategies and creativity in presenting the materials to students. The students of the sixth grade elementary school are still in the beginning
level and are young and it will be hard to attract their attention. Therefore, the main duty of the teacher is to introduce language skills by using interesting materials. By
doing so, the student will gain pleasure well as knowledge. By observing some elementary school teachers and analyzing today’s English
materials for elementary school, the writer found that values of life in teaching English were not popular. Some of the teachers are only focused on language skills
development and ignoring self development. The writer found some difficulties in presenting and making creative materials to make their students interested in
learning English. Based on those problems, the writer designed interesting materials for the sixth grade of elementary school students not only to develop students’
language skills but also to promote the students’ values of life.
C. Problem limitation
In order to limit the scope of the study, the writer makes some limitation in this research. Firstly, the writer only focuses on the discussion of designing a set of
supplementary English instructional materials using short stories for the sixth grade of elementary school students. Secondly, the writer develops supplementary English
instructional material for the sixth grade of elementary school students using short stories as the main materials. Thirdly, the materials are focused on both developing
students’ English ability and promoting the students’ values of life.
D. Problem Formulation
