THE EFFECTIVE TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING LISTENING


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DEVELOPING SPEAKING MATERIALS  

BY INCORPORATING CHARACTER BUILDING ASPECTS 

FOR EIGHTH GRADERS AT SMPN 3 BATU 
 

 

IndraPratiwi 

 

Mohammad Adnan Latief 

 

State University of Malang 

 

ABSTRACT 

Based on the needs analysis stage, it is found that the existing speaking materials do not 

employ character building aspects as demanded by the curriculum.Therefore, new 

speaking materials that incorporate character building aspects need to be developed. 

Research and Development (R&D) by Borg and Gall (1983)was used in this research 

involving the needs analysis, material development, expert validation, try-out, and final 

product.Five units with various tasks and activities which include both individual and 

group activities were developed containing the topics ofFriendship, Speak Up, Making 

Telephone Call,Share Your Story, and Indonesian Folktales. The researchers adopted 

the task-based and project-based learning principles. Particular aspects of character 

building were chosen based on the activities to be done by the students so that the 

students will be aware that they learnmoral values during the lesson. To help the 

English teachersthis materials provides teacher’s guide so that the teacher knows what 

s/he should do to teach character building aspects. After being validated by two 

education experts and tried out, the product is considered appropriate and acceptable to 

be taught to eight graders at SMPN 3 Batu.  

 

Key words : Material, Speaking, Character Building Aspects 

 

 

English is widely taught in Indonesia because it plays an important role in education 

since many people use English as a means of communication. Furthermore, it is stated 

that the goals of the teaching of English at MTs/ SMP are to develop the students’ oral 

and written competence at the level of functional literacy, to make the students have the 

awareness of the nature and the importance of English so as to improve the nation’s 

competitiveness in the global world, and to improve the students’ understanding about 

the interrelationship between language and culture (Depdiknas, 2006). 

 

Speaking is intuitively one of the important skills in communication. Nunan (1999) 

explains that speaking skill does not only include linguistic skills but also 

sociolinguistics and conversational skills that enable the speakers to know how to say 
what, to whom, and when to say. 

 

Furthermore, Richard at al(1985) provide the characteristics of communicative or 

speaking skill. The first is the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary of the language. 

The second is the knowledge of rules of speaking (knowing how to begin and end, 

knowing what topic can be talked about in different types of speech event, knowing 



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which address forms should be with different person one speaks to and in different 

situation). The third is knowledge of apologies, thanks, and invitation. The fourth is 

knowledge of how to use the language appropriately. However, English speaking can be 

very difficult for many students. In speaking, they not only need to be able to produce 

right pronunciation, intonation, or stress but also to be fluent and contextualized. In 

relation to classroom activity, most of the students are afraid of being laughed at by 

others. Those problems make the teaching of speaking more difficult to succeed.  

 

The problems are indicated by the data obtained from needs analysis done in SMPN 3 

Batu. English practice is the main problem in the activity of students. They tend to 

withdraw from the interaction with other students in class.When they were forced to 

communicate with others, they felt worried and unsure if their speaking can be 

understood.  

 

Another problem also appears dealing with speaking materials. Generally, materials are 

considered as the important component as a facility so that the process of learning will 

run well. According to Richards (2001) instructional materials generally serve as the 

basis for much of the language input that learners receive and the language practice that 

occurs in the classroom. For inexperienced teachers, materials also serve a form of 

teacher training, providing ideas how to plan and teach lessons as well as formats that 

teachers can use. Some teachers use instructional materials as their primary teaching 

resource. The materials provide the basis for the content of the lessons, the balance of 

the skills taught, the kinds of language practice students take part in other situations, and 

materials which serve primarily to supplement the teacher’s instruction.  

 

From the interview to the English teachers, it was found that the school had not applied 

2013 curriculum, the syllabus they used did not contain character building aspects. For 

the goals of curriculum, all the materials provided in the current compilation materials 

were made by the teachers in the school. The materials were used over and over without 

many changes in activities and exercises. The tasks for students were likely imitating 

what the teachers carried out, reading the dialogue with partner and making dialogue 

played in front of the class. Seemingly, thematerial was suitable to the demand of the 

curriculum. However, the activities in the book did not well-matchthe purpose and 

needs of students because the activities and tasks were limited in reading and writing 

skills. Also, tasks and practices were limited because the book was made to provide 

material rather than activities. Therefore, the book did not provide enough activities to 

be applied by the teachers and made the activities in every meeting monotonous.From 

this situation, the students found difficulties in comprehending the material and 

exploring their ability and creativity in speaking as demanded by the curriculum.  

 

The speaking activities in the materials were both individual and group tasks. For the 

individual tasks, students were assigned to answer the questions related to a dialogue 

they have read. For the group tasks, students were assigned to read the dialogue and 

play it in front of the class. The exercises presented in the book were in line with the 

topic discussed. However, the type of the exercises did not vary nor did it explore 

students’ creativity toward speaking English. In addition, the books or materials mostly 

used by the teachers were the commercial materials so it did not match the 

characteristics of English subject. 



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In materials development, Nunan (1991) mentions six principles to be fulfilled. First of 

all, materials should be clearly linked to the curriculum planning in the form of the 

assessment and the analysis of the needs of the target clientele followed by the 

formulation of the syllabus objectives. Secondly, materials should be authentic in terms 

of text and task. Texts and tasks are authentic if they are designed for purposes of 

language teaching. An example of an authentic text is one from a magazine. Authentic 

task would be one which people perform on their daily activities. Thirdly, materials 

should stimulate interaction. Students’ interaction promotes language learning in several 

ways, including: (a) providing greater opportunity for students to use language, (b) 

creating a less stressful environment for language use, (c) allowing students to use a 

greater range of language functions, (d) encouraging students to help one another, and 

(e) increasing students’ motivation to learn. Fourthly, materials should allow students to 

focus on formal aspects of the language. A focus in part of each unit on grammatical 

structure relevant to the initial teacher input, either spoken or written, enables the 

students to improve their spoken and written English in the context of overall emphasis 

on meaning. Fifthly, materials should encourage learners to develop learning skills and 

skills in learning. It is important to help students learn independently.  

 

Furthermore, the current materials did not employ explicit moral values development 

both as the objectives of the lessons and as the guidelines to develop tasks or practices 

as the demand of education in Indonesia currently. The exercises in the existing 

materials did not nurturemoral values development. In other words, the existing 

teaching materials in classroom were done only for improving students’ hard skill, not 

their soft skill.  

 

Recently, many social problems occur in Indonesia such as corruption, violence, sexual 

abuse, etc. which are done by educated people. Also, it commonly happens in school 

environment that a person, student or teacher, is able to speak fluently, but not politely. 

It shows that the problem on moral behavior currently becomes serious in education. 

Some solutions and alternatives are proposed such as making regulation and 

strengthening law enforcement. Therefore, it is better to give more attention to culture 

education and national characters as it is mentioned in National Education System No. 

20 in chapter 3 that the function of the national education is to develop academic ability 

and build good character to create better life in the country.  

 

There are 17 character building aspects in national character and cultural education, 

namely religious, honest, tolerant, disciplined, hard-working, creative, independent, 

democratic, curious, nationalistic, loving nation, sporting and respectful, friendly 

/communicative, peace loving, excited in reading, caring and compassionate, and eco-

friendly. However, only eight character building aspectsare included in the material 

namely communicative/ friendly, honest, tolerant, disciplined, nationalistic, creative, 

and curious. Based on the indicators, those character building aspects match with the 

materials and activities in the speaking materials. For example, in the material of asking 

and giving information, the students are expected to be aware that they have to be 

friendly/ communicative in asking for information and honest in giving information. 

Therefore, each topic of the material provides related character building aspects so that 

the students are aware of what aspects of character building they learn while doing 

certain activities.  



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Dealing with the activities in classroom, the English teachers sometimes do not know 

how to make the students aware of character building aspects while they are teaching 

speaking. Therefore, the proposed materials are completed with teacher’s guide so that 

the teacher knows what s/he should do to teach speaking that incorporates character 

building aspects. The materials providing varied activities or exercises are highly 

expected to help students achieve speaking competence. 

 

RESEARCH METHOD 

 

The design of this study is Research and Development (R & D) by Borg and Gall 

(1983). The purpose of this study involves development of materials or book, so the R 

& D is appropriate for that purpose. R & D method fits well with how to best develop 

materials. R&D involves continuous collaboration between researcher and practitioner. 

The researchers and practitioner collaboratively investigated the usage of the materials. 

Finally, the R & D methodology was found to be a very effective way to fill the gap 

between theory and practice. The stages of this development include needs analysis, 

materials development, expert validation, try out, and final product.  

 

The needs analysis stage covers the information obtained from the English teachers and 

the students of grade eight at SMPN 3 Batu. The first data wasobtained from the 

interview to the English teachers in SMPN 3 Batu. It covers some important 

information needed for developing the speaking materials incorporated with particular 

character building aspects .The interview was started by asking questions about the 

curriculum, the existing materials, information about the expected materials, and the 

information about the teaching of character building aspects. 

 

The second data was obtained from the students of grade eight atSMPN 3 Batu. To 

obtain information of the students’ needs toward the speaking materials, the researchers 

distributed the questionnaires to the 100 eight graders. The data were about the students’ 

problem in speaking English, activity, topics, and design of materials they preferred. 

Since the purpose of the questionnaire is to explore students’ opinions, students were 

allowed to choose more than one answer so that the total percentage of all components 

would not always be 100%. 

 

Based on the results of the needs analysis, materials development was accomplished 

following these five stages: reviewing the syllabus (Competence Standard and Basic 

Competence) which gave information of knowledge and comprehension of speaking 

skill, arranginginstructional objectives which allowed students to experience and 

explore communication competence, and selecting the topic material in terms of topic 

and level, and it lent itself to an exploitation that was relevant to learners’ needs and 

objectives of the learning, deciding activity and project that were adopted from other 

sources and some of them were made by the researchers based on the result of needs 

analysis of students, selecting character building aspects that matched the activity in 

each unit. 

 

Following the needs analysis and materials development is expert validation which aims 

at obtaining feedback, comments, and suggestions from experts for developing 

materials. Two experts were involved in this research. Their competence and 



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experiences contributed the refinement of the developed materials. The aspects to be 

validated are, namely, the quality and the applicability of the developed materials. The 

first expert validated the quality of the developed materials and the second expert 

validated the applicability of the developed materials. To give decision on product 

quality, the researcher used achievement level conversion as 5 for yes, 3 for partially, 

and 1 for no. The score was converted into description by following the range of 5-

Scales criterion proposed by Kuswandi (2001) in Batunan (2011).  

 

Following expert validation istry-out which aimed at knowing how the developed 

materials can be applied in the classroom. The try out activity was done to measure the 

applicability of the developed materials in the field. The try out activity also provides 

feedback for the developed materials especially when some problems appear during the 

implementation. The try out was conducted in the classroom with one of the teachers as 

the practitioner who tried out the materials using certain topics of the developed 

materials. During the try out the researchers observed the activity to record important 

information concerning the usefulness of the materials. The aspects of developed 

materials to be observed consist of the suitability of the topics for the students, the 

applicability of the activity, the design, and the language. Also, in this stage 

students’individual or group performance and interaction with their classmates in the 

classroom were observed. Some notes on problems encountered by students and the 

teacher’s information about how much the developed materials were applicable and 

suitable to be used in the classroom were taken as additional information. Finally the 

revisions were conducted based on the result of the observation during the try-out stage 

to eliminate the weaknesses in the developed materials. 

 

The subjects of the try out were 20 students taken randomly from different classes at 

SMPN 3 Batu. Thematerials were tried out for about one month. 

 

Result of Development 

The developed materials contain five topics: Friendship (asking, giving, rejecting help; 

asking, giving, and denying information; and making, accepting, and declining 

invitation), Speak Up (asking for, giving, refusing opinion; asking and giving 

agreement; and clarifying), Making Telephone Call(starting, extending, ending 

conversation on the phone and giving attention to speakers), Share Your Story (retelling 

stories/ experiences (recount); starting, extending, and ending a conversation; and 

compare two kinds of letter), and Indonesia Folktales (responding to Narrative texts). 

Each unit of the materials contains a model of dialogue, expressions to be used in 

interaction, and activities. The speaking activities in this research include 

communication gap, role-playing, and discussion. 

 

Besides tasks and practices, the materials also include some character building aspects 

namely communicative/ friendly, honest, tolerant, disciplined, etc. It was done not only 

as a demand of curriculum but also to help the teacher in teaching character building to 

students. The examples of those activities are group tasks in discussing some issues 

related to moral values.  

 

Besides speaking materials needed by the students, the product includes teacher’s guide 

to help the teachers know what they are going to do before the class begins. 



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From expert 1 in material development, the expert suggested to revise the materials 

(incomplete of materials, unclear instruction, and some language errors).Then, in the 

second validation, the expert suggested to try out the product. It means that the 

developed materials did not need to get major revision. The revision was related 

tolanguage errors and unclear instruction. From expert 2, the materials were rated very 

good. However, the expert suggested orally that the ‘debate activity’ should be changed 

into ‘small discussion’. After being revised, the expert suggested the researcher to try it 

out. All of experts show score above 75% which mean the developed materials is 

eligible to be used by users.  

 

The materials which were developed by using Borg and Gall’s model (1983) obtained 

positive comments from students and the teacher since it can motivate students to learn 

speaking in the target language. Besides, the materials help the students to realize the 

importance of character building aspects in their daily life. It is due to the fact that the 

developed materials have been developed based on the students’ needs; the product has 

been validated both on contents and applicability, and has accommodated the 

suggestions from the experts and students as users.  

 

The developed materials can provide enough practice and tasks that are beneficial for 

both students and teacher. The various tasks and exercises help students improve their 

speaking competence as well as the speaking performance. The students do not only 

deal with the content of the materials, but also the values from the activities and the 

tasks. Especially in speaking, the students learn seventeen moral values or character 

building aspects (communicative/ friendly, honest, tolerant, disciplined, nationalistic, 

creative, and curious). In other words, the students do not only improve their hard skill 

especially in speaking English but also improve their soft skill. 

 

Every unit in the developed materials is intended to prepare students for the final project 

and character building aspects that the students have to be aware about. The discussions 

deal with theories and also practice performance so that at the end, students have no 

burden to prepare their performance. Finally, the material is equipped with colorful and 

interesting pictures which can make students feel motivated to learn the material and to 

do the practice, exercises, and tasks on the book as it is stated by Tomlinson (1998) that 

the materials design and illustration (visual element) are necessary to achieve impact by 

being able to attract students’ curiosity, attention, and interest, to keep using the 

material and to help the students to feel at ease. In conclusion, with the strength of the 

developed materials, it is hoped that the materials can improve students’ competence in 

speaking based on the demand of the learning objective. 

 

Since there is no specific time allotment to finish the tasks in each unit, the teacher 

needs to decide which one should be done in class and which one should be assigned as 

the homework.  

 

CONCLUSIONS 

Several conclusions are drawn for the process of the research: (1)the final product of 

this development is the speaking materials which are incorporated with particular 

character building for eight grade students of SMPN 3 Batu, (2) the product was 

developed in the forms of sets of lesson, designed in a systematic format and completed 



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with teacher’s guide, (3) the speaking materials are suitable for facilitating and helping 

the students in their speaking practice and also helping them aware of character building 

aspects, (4) the product is appropriate for the students since it covers the language 

functions which are relevant to the students communication needs, (5) the appearance of 

the materials such as appeal of the illustrations and the appeal of the activities can 

improve the students’ interest in the learning process.  

 

The materials have been developed, validated by experts, tried out in the field, revised, 

and then presented as speaking materials entitled Let’s Speak Out Loud. The developed 

materials are hoped to give pedagogical implication as it can be used as one of the 

source materials for speaking to provide more exercises, tasks, or practices to help the 

teacher and students in the process of teaching and learning speaking. The developed 

materials can be used by students of SMPN 3 Batu and can be adopted by other junior 

high school students with similar needs. 

 

Based on the whole process of conducting the development research, some 

recommendations are presented on how to make use of the product and how to make the 

product better. The comments from the experts, students, and also the teacher can be 

used to improve positive aspects of the materials. The clarity of learning objectives is 

required to be the basic foundation to develop the content of the materials. 

 

RECOMMENDATION 
In relation to the improvement of the developed materials, it is necessary for other 

researchers or other people who are interested in the product to try-out all units in the 

materials to get the information about the strength and weaknesses of each unit or 

chapter based on the user of the material. Other recommendation is to use more than one 

teacher or lecturer to teach so that more insight and input can be obtained. 

 

For the future researchers especially in material development area, this research result 

can be used as one reference for developing materials especially for speaking. The 

stages can be followed and revised based on the purpose and scope of the research.For 

other researches, this product can be verified using experimented research design.  

 

 

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