Discussion on the Evaluation of the Designed Materials

b. The Results of the Open-Response Questionnaire

In this section, the respondents were able to answer the questions of the questionnaire freely. There were three questions in this section. Those three questions were about the weaknesses, the suggestions, and also the opinions on the designed materials. Therefore, the writer found four important points to consider related to the designed materials. They were: 1 The instructions in the designed materials should be simpler and clearer enough so that the students were able to understand them. 2 There was no numbering in every section of each unit. 3 Some texts were too difficult for the tenth grade students to understand, especially the texts in the two last units. 4 It would be better if the task in the vocabulary section was matching the English words to the Indonesian words instead of matching the English words to its synonyms. 5 The designed materials should have offered more comprehension strategies in order to help the students understand the texts which seemed difficult for most of the tenth grade students.

c. Discussion on the Evaluation of the Designed Materials

From the results stated above, it was found that the average point of the central tendencies was 3.9 on the scale of 5. This means that the designed materials are well-designed and acceptable for the tenth grade students of SMA BOPKRI I Yogyakarta. Nevertheless, some revisions were still needed for the sake of appropriateness and relevancy of the materials. Here are the results of the revisions: 1 Considering that the instructions of the designed materials should be easily understood by the students, the writer rechecked the instructions again. By revising the instructions, it was expected to make the students become clearer on what they should do, especially in accomplishing every activity in the designed materials. Besides, the layout of the instructions was also modified so that the students would easily recognize the instructions of every activity provided in the designed materials. 2 The numbering for every section within the unit was added to give the students and the teacher clear description on the sections provided in the designed materials. Moreover, the numbering could help the teacher use the designed materials in the learning process. 3 In order to decrease the level of the text difficulty, the writer simplified some of the texts used in the designed materials in order to make the texts become more appropriate for the purpose of English language teaching for the tenth grade students. Furthermore, the text simplification was done by reducing the length of the texts, simplifying the vocabulary of the text, adding the sentence connectors, minimizing the use of technical words etc. According to Brinton et al 1989, the materials in CBI are possibly generated by the teacher so that it fits the goals which should be achieved by the students. 4 Dealing with the ‘extraordinary’ texts presented in the designed materials, the writer added some more comprehension strategies for the students in order to assist them to understand the texts. Those strategies included scanning, skimming, getting the main idea, and questioning. Therefore, those strategies were applied in the pre-reading and whilst-reading activities. Taking into consideration that not every suggestion is in accordance with the underlying theories used in designing the materials, the writer did not follow the suggestion to revise the vocabulary tasks provided in the designed materials. The writer considered that providing the Indonesian meanings in the vocabulary tasks would provide inadequate L2 exposures for the students which may hinder the students’ L2 proficiency. Besides, providing Indonesian meanings in the vocabulary tasks would cause a smaller amount of effort for the students to struggle to achieve comprehensible input.

B. The Description of the Reading Instructional Materials

After making some revisions, this part comprises the description of reading instructional materials as the answer to the second question formulated in the Problem Formulation. The reading instructional materials consist of five themes which are organized into ten units. Specifically, each theme consists of two units. Furthermore, the themes presented in the designed materials are related to the students’ subject matter classes, such as physical science subjects, economy, and