67
3 Students’ perception on the difficulties in reading and writing
According to the data, the mean score of the third statement which was the difficulties in reading and writing shows 25.87 points in range between 25.01 up
to 32.50. 32.51-40.00
Very difficult
25.01-32.50 Difficult
17.51-25.00 Quite difficult
10.00-17.50 Undifficult
From the categories above, the writer concluded that learning to read and to write was difficult for the target students. The purpose of assessing the
target students‟ difficulties was to determine the focus of learning to certain level of learning. The
students were in the novice-high level of language proficiency Brown, 2001. They needed to learn about how to read paragraphs, short simple stories which
were beginning to use skimming and scanning and to write is similary more sophisticated Brown, 2001.
b. Learner
s’ Needs Based on the Interviewe
The variables of interview are the teacher‟s perception on students‟
learning difficulties, teacher‟s preferences of teaching method and teacher‟s
perception on applying contextual and authentic materials. This interview was conducted in 28 March 2014 between the researcher and target teacher.
The process of data analysis was started from familiarizing, coding, data displaying, and data generating Ary, Jacobs, Sorensen, 2010. Firstly, the
writer transcribed the interview record and re-read the transcription for several times to familiarize the contents. After that, the writer produced a list of coding
68 categories to sort the data down. It was used to visualize and generate data into
some categories and themes. There were several types of coding categories that are provided by Bogdan and Biklen 2003, while the writer applied only three
codes. The list of the codes and the definitions were shown in table 4.2.
Table 4.2: List of the Codes and Definitons
No Codes
Definitions
1 Subject
‟s ways of thinking about people and objects
Codes got at the subject ‟s
understandings of contextual materials, authentic materials,
and discussion method 2
Activity codes Codes directed the occuring
teacher ‟s teaching focus in
discussion method and the students‟ learning behavior
3 Strategy codes
Codes referred to learning through modeling friends and
teachers through
directly revising
their mistakes,
learning in a group and learning
through authentic
pictures.
Referring to the list of codes, the writer generated three themes, those are 1 The relevance of contextual and authentic materials ,2 The implication of
discussion method and 3 the limitation of learning focuss. They were presented in detailed as follows.
Theme 1: The relevance of contextual and authentic materials
This first theme referred to subject‟s way of thinking and activity coding
categories. The respondent gave definitions of contextual and authentic materials. Contextual materials were:
educational processes which were holistic. Contextual materials aimed to motivate the students to understand lessons with relating the lessons to
their daily lives such as students‟ personal contexts, social contexts and
69 cultural contexts. Contextual materials empowered also the students to
have proper knowledge or flexible skills which could be used for solving problems in social contexts. [own translation]
Then authentic materials were: the real writings. The students were taught to write in English. Parts of
writing that needed my fully attention were pronunciation, punctuation, capitalizing words and dictions. So, authentic materials were ideal for
teaching. [own translation]
The teacher insisted that contextual materials really helped the students in reading and writing because they learned from their own lives. The teacher states
that: the contextual materials which I applied helped the students enough in
learning English.The students were taught about what they experienced in their lives. In learning English, we transferred Indonesia to English. [own
translation]
The teacher used contextual topics in teaching such as daily activities. The teacher decided the contents inside the topics
based on students‟ personal lives, social contexts and culture contexts. The authentic materials were applied by the
teacher to make a connection between learning process and a real world. The teacher said that the students were motivated to read and write when he used
authentic materials as instructional materials and instructional media. The authentic teaching materials were newspaper, real advertisement, etc. Catherine,
1992.
Theme 2 : The implication of discussion method
This second theme was generated from activity code and technique coding code. Teaching method that was used by the teacher was discussion method. The
teacher motivated the students to work in group. The teacher said that:
