The Relevance Of Listening Materials In The English Textbook Pathway To English For Tenth Grade Senior Highschool Published By Erlangga

Abstract

Learning materials in a textbook should always be in line with the recent curriculum. Therefore textbook needs a certain evaluation to keep it appropriate with the curriculum. Textbooks are the main and most important tool for teaching and learning, not only in Indonesia but also in most other countries. With the large number of published textbooks, teachers are demanded to be more careful in selecting a textbook. Therefore, to keep the published textbook in line with the curriculum, it is necessary to have a certain evaluation done. Among the four language skills, listening is the language skills most often used in everyday life and the most difficult to master. Students of secondary level learn listening mostly through the listening materials available in the textbook and Pathway to English is a popular book in the market. However, it is not a perfect learning resource. It has some flaws. Therefore, an evaluation is needed to be done to choose good listening material. The research objective was to know what kind of materials available in the Pathway to English for Tenth Grade Senior Highschool and to determine whether those materials were relevant to the 2013 Curriculum or not. The research result was expected to be used as a consideration in choosing listening materials source. The design of this research was content analysis. This research focused on assessing Pathway to English, especially on the listening materials which were available throughout all of the chapters in the textbook. The data collection method was documentation. The data collected was collected by using tables in order to list and compare the relevancies between listening materials in the textbook The researcher found that there were 56 listening materials in the Pathway to English textbook with 39 of them were fairly relevant to the curriculum, 12 listening materials were very relevant to the curriculum, and only 5 of 56 listening materials were poorly relevant to the curriculum. It made the Pathway to English for X Grade Students of Senior High School 91% relevant to the curriculum. The book fulfilled its role as a source of information and provided the students with enough spoken material examples of expressions for the students to use in their daily life. The listening materials in the textbook were considered as inauthentic because of the speed speech that was to slow. The listening materials provided in the textbook were more on the side of material knowledge rather than comprehension. In conclusion, the textbook Pathway to English was a good source of listening materials but need some supplementary materials that were more authentic and to polish students’ comprehension.