THE RELEVANCE OF LEARNING MATERIALS OF THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH ON SKY 2” FOR THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS TO THE SCHOOL BASED CURRICULUM FOR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

Curriculum and teaching and learning process have an important role in education. Curriculum is a set of designs and rules concerning objectives, contents, instructional materials, and ways used as guideline in doing learning activities to achieve certain educational system. On the other hand, the teacher who is doing the curriculum in the classroom for teaching and learning process should be able to do learning activities based on the curriculum. Based on School Based Curriculum, learning materials deal with the teaching materials that are given by the teacher covered four language skills and three language components. The English teacher can take the materials from the textbooks, internet, brochures, newspapers, advertisements and many others that are written in English. The materials which are taken from the English textbooks should be selected whether their materials are relevant to the curriculum or not. Therefore the English textbooks have to be analyzed comprehensively before the teacher selects and uses them in teaching and learning process in the school. This research was done to analyze the relevance of learning materials of the English textbook “English on Sky 2” for the eighth grade students published by Erlangga in 2007 to the School Based Curriculum for Junior High School. The design of this research was documentary analysis. The data of this research were the learning materials of the English textbook “English on Sky 2” for the eighth grade students published by Erlangga in 2007. The School Based Curriculum for the eighth grade students for Junior High School was the parameter to measure the relevance of learning materials of the English textbook “English on Sky 2” for the eighth grade students published by Erlangga in 2007. From the research results, it was found that the learning materials of the English textbook “English on Sky 2” for the eighth grade students published by Erlangga in 2007 are relevant to the School Based Curriculum for Junior High School. It is because the relevance of learning materials stated in the English textbook “English on Sky 2” showed that there are 73.2% of learning materials which are relevant to the School Based Curriculum and 26.8% of learning materials which are irrelevant to the School Based Curriculum. It means that it includes sufficient quantity of the learning materials stated in the School Based Curriculum. For each skill, the relevance of learning materials in the English textbook “English on Sky 2” includes listening materials that are 71.2% relevant to the School Based Curriculum, speaking materials that are 69.7% relevant to the School Based Curriculum, reading materials that are 81.6% very relevant to the School Based Curriculum, and writing materials that are 78.1% relevant to the School Based Curriculum. It can be seen that most of the materials in the English textbook “English on Sky 2” are relevant to the School Based Curriculum. Therefore, the English textbook “English on Sky 2” can be used a source of learning materials for the eighth grade students. In line with the research result above, the researcher suggests the English teacher to use the English textbook “English on Sky 2” in teaching and learning process in the classroom. But still the teacher has to find other materials which are not available in the English textbook “English on Sky 2” in another English textbook or other sources. For further researcher, it is suggested to conduct a further research that focuses on analyzing the other English textbook for certain level published by a certain publisher to the curriculum applied currently.