READING MATERIALS

 READING MATERIALS

Warta Madrasah - In daily life, language is always used by people for communication. As human being, people tend to live or interact with other people. It proves that in general, human beings are social creatures who need each other. As social creatures, the most important thing is that naturally they are motivated to interact with other people to express their existence, needs, opinions, and to influence other people. The importance of language includes all of the aspects of life because experience, feeling, and idea of someone can only be known by other people by using language. It means that language is used for communication.

English is an important means of communication which is used in many countries in the world. It plays in important role in the process of modernization as an international language to be taught in schools. The purpose of teaching English is to develop four language skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing. These four language skills enable students to take part in information exchange, to establish interpersonal relationship, and to obtain knowledge as well as to enjoy the language esthetic of English. The teacher must develop four language skills that their students own, so that they can use language to communication and to express their mind, their feeling and their idea.

There are four skills in English, they are listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Those skills are important to be mastered without ignoring each other. For many students, reading is the important of the four skills in second language. As a skill, reading is clearly one of important language skill that where students have to read English material for their subject. The student often thought to be easier to obtain information from written text by reading.

Reading skill in one language is not necessarily transferred to another language. The result of teaching reading, however, is still considered to be unsatisfactory despite how long it has been taught in school and various techniques of teaching reading used. Most of students face difficulties in reading English text due to the different English language features from their  first language. Basically, teaching reading is conveying or guiding the students to gain some important message and get meaning from written text. Most of students are interested in reading the English written material such as; book, novel, newspaper, article, text, etc. In the English lesson of Junior High School the development of reading skills, especially in analyses kinds of text.

Nowadays, the government has arranged the 2006 School-Based Curriculum named KTSP. It is an operational curriculum which is formed and practiced by each school Indonesia.2 But actually it does not change the basis of Competence-Based Curriculum substantially. The aim of English teaching according to the School-Based Curriculum is that the students of Junior High School hopefully can achieve that functional level of literacy because they are preparing to continue their study to the Senior High School. Besides that, School-Based Curriculum also deals with the four language skills, such as; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In reading, it refers to the text. It means that the students are able to understand and producing various shorts functional and monologue texts, and essay in the form of narrative, descriptive, recount, procedure, and report.       

The materials can be authentic materials, for example from newspaper, magazine, recipe or textbook. The English teacher should be able to decide whether the contents of the textbook are suitable with the current curriculum or not. Textbooks are important for students to prepare and fulfill experiences in the good process.

According to Dana Ferris and John S. Hedgcock, “textbooks are so pervasive in educational systems throughout the world. Indeed, textbooks provide the backbone for the courses many educators teach”. It means that the materials in the textbook should help the teacher in conducting teaching and learning process, so it is important for the teacher to select and to analyze the contents of textbook.

There are some categories of a good book. First, the contents of the textbook should deal with the current curriculum; it might be from the genre with should be available in the textbook.

Besides that, the contents of the textbook also go with the level of study. In the textbook include lexical density which is measure the proportion content words in a text. The second  category is a textbook should have an interesting display because it can give motivation for readers to read the textbook. In addition, the language of the textbook should correct in context and situation. It means that the language does not enclose ambiguous, so the reader can understand easily.

Based on those explanations, the writer would like to try to analyze the reading materials found in English on Sky textbook for 9th grade of Junior High School published by Erlangga. There are several reasons why the writer chooses the book; First, English on Sky textbook is one of book that suitable with the current curriculum. Second, English on Sky textbook used for teaching English to ninth year’s students in Semarang because, it is important to know whether the reading materials are appropriate with the students’ need.

Third, the writer used this book to know the lexical density of reading text based on the 9th grade level of Junior High School.  

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