Steps in Designing Materials
one place to another. One example is pair work in which each member of the pair has a part of the total information for example
an incomplete picture and attempts to convey it verbally to the other.
The next is reasoning – gap activity, which is an activity of
deriving some new information from given information through processes of inference, deduction, practical reasoning, or a
perception of relationships or patterns. One example is working out a teacher’s timetable on the basis of given class timetables, and
the last is opinion – gap activity, which involves identifying and
articulating a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in response to a given situation, for example like a story completion. The
activity may involve using factual information and formulating arguments to justify one’s opinion, but there is no objective
procedure for demonstrating outcomes as right or wrong, and no reason to expect the same outcome from different individuals or
on different occasions. Other types of task activities are proposed by Pattison in
Richards and Nunan 1990: 68, those are questions and answers, which based on the notion of creating an information gap by
letting learners to make a personal and secret choice from a list of language items which all fit into a given frame, dialogues and role
– plays, which can be wholly scripted or wholly improvised.
Another type of task activities is matching activities, which recognize the students to match items, or to complete pairs or sets.
The next is communication strategies, which is designed to encourage learners to practice communication strategies such as
paraphrasing, borrowing or inventing words, using gesture, asking for feedback, and simplifying. The other tasks activities are
pictures and picture stories, which can stimulate any communication activities, for example spot the difference,
memory test, or sequencing pictures to tell a story, puzzles and problems, which require learners to ‘make guesses, draw on their
general knowledge and personal experience, use their imagination and test their powers of logical reasoning’, and the last is
discussions and decisions, which require the learner to collect and share information to reach a decision.
From the explanations above, it can be concluded that activities are what the learners will do to the input in order to
achieve the point of learning tasks. There are many kinds of activities which can be applied in the learning materials in order to
improve the students’ language skills. d. Teacher and Students’ Roles
Role refers to the part that learners and teachers are expected to play in carrying out learning tasks as well as the social and
interpersonal relationships between the participants Richards and
Nunan, 1990: 79. It means that both teacher and students have to be active during the teaching and learning process in the classroom.
In order to make the students more active in the classroom, teacher may use any activities which encourage the students about the
nature of language and ways to learn. It is more effective then asking the students to memorizing and manipulating the Language.
According to Richards and Rodgers in Richards and Nunan 1990: 84, the roles of the teacher are related to:
1. the types of functions teachers are expected to fulfill, such as, whether that of practice director, counselor, or
model. 2. the degree of control the teacher has over how learning
takes place. 3. the degree to which the teacher is responsible for
content. 4. the interactional patterns that develop between teachers
and learners. Meanwhile, learners’ role depends on the approach used in
teaching and learning process in the classroom. Based on Nunan 2004: 65, there are some categori
es of learners’ roles as follow. a Learner is a passive recipient of outside stimuli.
b Learner is an interactor and negotiator who is capable of giving as well as thinking.