DEVELOPING ENGLISH LEARNING MATERIALS USING A THEME-BASED STORYBOOK FOR READING COMPREHENSION OF “WHEN ENGLISH RINGS A BELL” TEXTBOOK FOR GRADE VII OF SMP/MTs

This research aimed to: (1) find out the students’ needs of Grade VII SMP/MTs in terms of reading comprehension in learning English and (2) develop the appropriate English learning materials using a theme-based storybook for reading comprehension of the “When English Rings A Bell” textbook for Grade VII of SMP/MTs. This was a research and development (R & D) study. The subjects were the students of SMP Negeri 15 Yogyakarta Classes VII-E and VII-F. The procedure was adapted from Smaldino, Lowther, and Russel (2012), which was called the ASSURE Model. The steps were conducting needs analysis, selecting and utilizing materials for developing the course grid, writing the first draft of the materials, evaluating the materials through the expert judgment, and revising it under suggestions and feedback obtained from the evaluation. Needs analysis questionnaires were employed as the instruments for collecting data. The data obtained from the needs analysis and the evaluation were analysed quantitatively using frequency and percentage and descriptively through the descriptive statistics respectively. The research findings revealed that: (1) they learned English to be able to comprehend and use English properly both orally and in writing for daily life; (2) regarding reading, their goal was to be able to comprehend English texts; (3) they found it difficult to comprehend English texts due to the lack of vocabulary mastery; (4) they wanted to have reading texts featured with supporting pictures to help their understanding of the texts; (5) they wanted to have a storybook with various interesting stories as the learning input; (6) they expected to have reading materials of which the themes were daily life and hobbies; (7) they preferred to do group discussions in learning; and (8) the teacher should discuss together the materials given to support the students’ comprehension. Afterwards, the course grid was developed. The materials were developed into three units. Although each unit has different numbers of tasks, it follows the unit design of which the components are: (1) introduction (Unit Title, Learning Objectives, Task 1, Task 2, and Task 3); (2) main lesson (Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11, Task 12, and Task 13); and (3) reinforcement (Homework, Evaluation, Reflection, The Fun Corner, and Vocabulary). Further, the results of the expert judgment showed that the developed materials were appropriate in terms of the content, language, presentation, and layout. The mean score of all aspects was 3.63 which was categorized as “very good” as it is in the range of 3.25 ≤ x ≤ 4