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explanation and expected the teacher to motivate the students to be creative in finishing their tasks.
3. Characteristics of the English Learning Materials for the Students of Travel Agent
The first part of the materials is a title. Each unit have a title that reflects the topic and goal of the learning. The title was followed by pictures and an
overview paragraph which are used as an attention getting opener. It is used to guide the students to know the goals and objectives that they are going to reach
and the content they are going to learn. The goals of English learning were taken and adapted from the core competencies and basic competencies of English
curriculum for vocational high school. The topic for the materials was related to the daily life of the students and travel agent field in order to get the students‟
attention and to motivate them. Each unit consists of eight main sections. They are getting started, written
cycle, spoken cycle, homework, evaluation, reflection, summary, and vocabulary list. At the beginning of each unit, the students are provided with the activities
which recall their background knowledge or warming up activity. In section “getting started” in Unit 1 and Unit 3 there are questions that the students should
answer. Meanwhile, in Unit 2 there are pictures that the students should study. The students are introduced to the key ideas like a list of vocabulary featured with
the pronunciation, the part of speech and the Indonesian. Besides, they have to listen to and repeat after the teacher or recording. These controlled activities
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rehearse them to the next tasks in the main activity; written cycle and spoken cycle.
The main language lesson taught in the materials contains the integrated tasks, spoken tasks and written tasks. It is started with the receptive skill and
continued to the productive skills; listening to speaking and reading to writing. The tasks in spoken cycle aim at enabling the students to identify the oral texts
and to use the language functions according to context appropriately and accurately. The tasks in written cycle aim at enabling the students to identify the
information in the written texts, to give the information and to communicate in written way appropriately and grammatically.
In each cycle, there are several steps based on scientific approach. They are “looking at”, “questioning”, “finding the answer” and “creating”. In “looking
at” stage the students examine a text and write things that they do not know or they want to know more. Based on what they observe, in “questioning” the
students are asked to make questions. In “finding the answer” the students are asked to collect information to answer the questions that they have and use their
information to answer the questions. Next, they should present the result to the class. Last, in “creating” stage the students will be asked to create a text.
However, before creating a text the students are given several guided and semi guided tasks. These tasks are followed by the additional activities where the
students could learn more such as evaluation and homework. The materials provide the activities that helped the students to do self
reflection. The reflection can support and encourage the students to check how
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well their understanding of the lessons and to review and evaluate their roles in doing the task. The materials are completed with the vocabulary lists that contain
the words featured with their part of speech, phonetic transcriptions and the Indonesian.
B. Suggestions