The Identification of Life Skill Education in English Textbook Entitled “Forward an English” for the Tenth Grade Students of Vocational High School

Abstract

Life skills have become one of skills required by all human life to relinquish many challenges in this 21st century. In support to all those challenges, the education sector is in responsible to accommodate students the attainment of life their skills. The development of life skills for school students can be acquired through the textbook materials; as a consequence, textbooks with life skill content existence apparently will be a crucial vehicle to support high school students including vocational students to learn and develop their life skills. The need of choosing an appropriate textbook with life skill contents for vocational high school students is essential. This study by applying Content Analysis Design investigated the availability and the percentage of life skill materials in the textual tasks of the English textbook entitled “Forward an English” for the Tenth Graders of Vocational High School. Four kinds of life skills were identified with different percentages and randomly distributed in each chapter in the textbook. The proportion of Personal Skills was 23.8%, Social Skills was 42.8%, Academic Skills was 14.2%, and Vocational Skills was 19.4%. Although it could be claimed that this book is suitable for the vocational students, it remained necessary for the teachers to enrich materials of academic and vocational skills to assist students to be more ready to their future working environments,