41 Teaching Material

TEACHING MATERIAL

By: Fitriah
Kaprodi Bahasa Inggris Jurusan Tarbiyah STAIN Malikussaleh Lhokseumawe
Email: [email protected]

Abstrak
Ada lima komponen penting dalam proses pengajaran yaitu; siswa,
guru, bahan ajar, metode mengajar dan evaluasi. Bahan ajar
merupakan salah satu komponen yang sangat penting untuk
kelancaran proses belajar dan mengajar dalam kelas yang dapat
membantu guru dan siswa. Jadi, hendaknya isi bahan ajar
disesuaikan dengan kemampuan yang memakainya, baik guru
maupun murid. Bahan ajar bisa dibuat dalam bentuk dan ukuran
apapun seperti lazimnya untuk mendukung dan meningkatkan
kualitas proses pembelajaran karena bahan ajar itu sendiri
bermanfaat untuk keefektifan mengajar. Kualiatas bahan ajar
sangatlah berpengaruh terhadap kualitas mengajar. Bahan ajar
dapat dipilih dalam bentuk textbook yang disesuaikan dengan
kurikulum yang meliputi isi sebagai tambahan aktivitas kelas,
latihan, lembaran, peta atau grafik, lembaran ulangan dan lain
sebagainya.
Kata kunci: Teaching and Material.

Abstract
Language instruction has five important components that they are
students, a teacher, materials, teaching methods and evaluation.
Teaching materials should help the students to learn or as part of
the activities of instruction learning in the class that help both
teacher and learners. Ideally, teaching materials will be tailored to
the content in which they are being used, to the students in whose
class they are being used, and the teacher. Teaching materials
come in many shapes and sizes, but they all in common the ability
to support students learning. So, teaching material can support
students learning and increase student success, because
instructional materials for effective teaching. The quality of those
materials directly impact to the quality of teaching. Knowing how
to find the best instructional materials is a valuable skill for a
teacher to have. Materials chosen in teaching learning include

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 Fitriah 42

textbooks that extent to which a curriculum will involve teacher

made materials which content of additional activities and
exercises, handouts, charts, review sheets, etc.
Keywords: Teaching and Material

A. Introduction
Language instruction has five important components that they are students,
a teacher, materials, teaching methods and evaluation. The learners are the center
of instruction and learning. The curriculum, the methods of learning and also the
teaching material is a statement of the goals of learning process for both teachers
and learners. So, a teacher has to follow the curriculum and provide the materials
for teaching class.
Most people think about teaching process as the overt presentation of
information by teachers to learners. Teaching is any activities done in the class
room as learning ways. Tomlinson (1998:3) states that teaching is anything done
by materials developers or teachers to facilitate the learning of the language.
Hence, a teacher often prepares exercises or sets of materials for his/her own
classes, which can be refined over a period of time on the basis of topics that will
be taught for the students in the class.
Teaching materials are the resources that a teacher uses to deliver
instruction. Tomlinson (1998:2) views that “materials is used to refer to anything
which is used by the teachers or the learners to facilitate the learning of a language.
Materials could obviously be cassettes, videos, CD- Rom, dictionaries, grammar
books, readers, workbook, or photo copied exercises. In other words, they any be
anything which is deliberately used to increase the learners’ knowledge or
experience of the language”. Each teacher requires a range of tools to draw upon
in order to assist and support students learning. These materials play a large role in
making knowledge accessible to learner and can encourage a student to engage
with knowledge in different ways.

B. The Useful of Teaching Material

The teachers can do everything to help their learners learn more
effectively, developing teaching material is very important to increase the
students’ skill from lower to the higher. As Burkill and Eaton (2011:18) state that
the teacher need to do is develop materials that move the learners from the low or
bottom end of the ladder to the high or top no matter what their level of ability. It is
mean that the quality of those materials directly impacts the quality of teaching.

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43 Teaching Material

Teaching materials should help the students to learn or as part of the

activities of instruction learning in the class that help both teacher and learners.
O’Neill (1990) argues that materials may be suitable for students’ needs, even if
they are not designed specifically for them, that textbooks make it possible for
students to review and prepare their lesson. So, the materials of teaching have
function to control the instruction in teaching learning process. Here some
principles of the useful the relevant development of materials for teaching
according to Tomlinson (1998:7-21);

a. Materials should achieve impact

Impact is achieved when materials have a noticeable effect on learners that
is when the learners’ curiosity, interest and attention are attracted. Materials can
achieved impact through; a) novelty, e.g. unusual topics, illustrations and activities.
b) Variety, e.g. breaking up the monotony of a unit routine with an unexpected
activity, using many different text type taken from many different types of sources,
using a number of different instructor voices on a cassette or audio visual. c)
attractive presentation, e.g. use the attractive colors, lots of white space or use of
photograph. d) appealing content, e.g. topics of interest to the target learners, topics
which offer the possibility of learning something new, engaging stories, universal
themes, local references.

b. Material should help learners to feel at ease

Comfortable class is one of teacher’s responsibility and guarantee to the
students during teaching learning in the class. Materials can help learners to feel at
ease in a number of ways. For example;
- Feel more comfortable with lots of white space than they do with materials in
which lots of different activities are crammed together on the same page.
- Feel more relaxed with materials which are obviously trying to help them to
learn than they are with materials which are always testing them. Feeling at
ease can also be achieved through a ‘voice’ which is relaxed and
supportive, through content and activities which encourage the personal
participation of the learners.
- Informal discourse features for example contracted forms, informal lexis
- The active rather than the passive voice
- Concreteness like example and anecdotes
- Inclusiveness, for example not signaling intellectual, linguistic or cultural
superiority over the learners.

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The teacher must prepare the comfortable materials for teaching learning and
avoid of feeling anxious, uncomfortable or tense of learner feeling. Making
comfortable materials is the responsibility of the teacher to help the students to feel
ease.
c. Materials should help learners to develop confidence
Most materials developers recognize the need to help learners to develop
confidence. They become aware that the process is being simplified for them and
that what they are doing bears little resemblance to actual language use. The
students also become aware that they are not really using their brains and their
apparent success is an illusion, and this awareness can even lead to reduction in
confidence.

d. Materials should require and facilitate learner self-investment

The learners profit most if they invest interest, effort and attention in the
learning activity. Materials can help them to achieve this by providing them with
choices of focus and activity, by giving them topic control and by engaging them
in learner- centre discovery activities. Other ways of achieving learner investment
are involving the learners in mini-projects, involving them in finding
supplementary materials for particular units in a book and giving them
responsibility for making decisions about which texts to use and how to use them.

e. Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target
language
Learners should be given opportunities to use language for communication
involves attempts to achieve a purpose in a situation in which the content,
strategies and expression of interaction are determined by the learners. Such
attempts can enable the learners to check the effectiveness of their internal
hypotheses, especially if the activities stimulate them into pushed output.

f. Materials should take into account that the positive effects of instruction
It is important for materials to recycle instruction and to provide frequent
and ample exposure to the instructed language features in communicative use. It is
equally important that the learners are not forced into premature production of the
instructed features that the teachers will get the students wrong, and that tests of
proficiency are not conducted immediately after instruction that they will indicate
failure.

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g. Materials should take into account that learners differ styles

Different learners have different preferred learning styles. So, for those
learners with a preference for learning are much more likely to gain from explicit
grammar teaching than those who prefer experiential learning. Those who prefer
experiential learning are more likely to gain from reading a story with a
predominant grammatical feature, e.g. reported speech than they are from being
taught that feature explicitly. This means that activities should be variable and
should cater for all learning styles.

h. Materials should take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes
Ideally language learners should have strong and consistent motivation and
they should also have positive feelings towards the target language, their teachers,
their fellow learners and the materials they are using. The ideal learner does not
exist and even if she did exist one day should no longer be the ideal learner the
next day. Each class of learners using the same materials will differ from each
other in terms long and short term motivation and of feelings and attitudes about
the language, their teachers, their fellow learners and their learning materials.
Obviously, no materials developer can cater for all these affective variables but it
is important for anybody who is writing learning materials to be aware of the
evitable attitudinal differences of the users of the materials.

i. Materials should permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction

The silent period can facilitate the development of an effective internalized
grammar which can help learners to achieve proficiency when they eventually start
to speak in the L2. The important point is that the materials should not force
premature speaking in the target language and they should not force silence either.
Give the possibility time for the learners until they ready to speak.

j. Materials should not rely too much on controlled practice

Controlled practice activities in the classroom are valuable. Ellis (1990: 192)
conforms that controlled practice appears to have little long term effect on the
accuracy with which new structures are performed. So the materials are created as
a control the process in the class.

k. Materials should provide opportunities for outcome feedback

Feedback which is focused first on the effectiveness of the outcome rather
than just on the accuracy of the output can lead to output becoming a profitable
source of input. In the other words, if the language that learner produces is
evaluated in relation to the purpose for which it is used that language can become a

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 Fitriah 46

powerful and informative source about language use. It is very important that
materials developers can make the language production activities have intended
outcomes other than just practicing language. The value of outcome feedback is
stressed to find out more some of the principles of language learning.

C. The Standardization of Teaching Material

Preparing the materials before starting class is the first important step that
a teacher must be done. The material have to reach the goal of learning process, it
is meant that there are some standardizations in arranging the material. There are
three domain objective of teaching learning process, so the materials that the
teacher provided have to follow the standard of teaching materials. Bloom in
Burkill and Eaton classifies (2011:18) all learning process into:
➢ Cognitive : knowledge, knowing (how and why) thinking skills.
➢ Psychomotor : motor skills or physical skill
➢ Affective : feeling, attitudes, emotions and values.

The teaching materials designed according to syllabus that is to create a

good communicative among learners or between students and teacher. The
following statements taken from a number of standard published materials based
on McDonough and Shaw (2003: 20):
1. ‘for students interested in using language rather than learning more about
structure.. students learn to use the appropriate language they need for
communicating in real life’

2. ‘… is a dynamic, functionally-based course book. It is an intensely

practical book, giving the students opportunity for thorough and
meaningful rehearsal of the English they will need for effective
communication’

3. ‘… to use the language to communicate in real life’

4. ‘… teaches students to communicate effectively by understanding and

controlling the relationship between language forms and function’

5. ‘… places emphasis on developing skills of discourse within a wide

range of communicative settings. It actively trains the learner in
important discourse functions... All the language practice is presented in
real-life contexts and related to the learner’s own experience.’

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Ideally, teaching materials will be tailored to the content in which they are
being used, to the students in whose class they are being used, and the teacher.
Teaching materials come in many shapes and sizes, but they all in common the
ability to support students learning. So, teaching material can support students
learning and increase student success, because instructional materials for effective
teaching. The quality of those materials directly impact to the quality of teaching.
Knowing how to find the best instructional materials is a valuable skill for a
teacher to have.
Materials chosen in teaching learning include textbooks that extent to
which a curriculum will involve teacher made materials which content of
additional activities and exercises, handouts, charts, review sheets, etc. J. Brown
in Brown (2007: 158) lists five major categories to consider in choosing a text
book;
(a) Author’s and publisher’s reputation
(b) Fit to the curriculum, included meeting needs, goals, etc,
(c) Physical characteristics (layout, organization, etc
(d) Logistical Factors; price, auxiliary aids, workbooks
(e) Teach ability especially the usefulness of a teacher’s edition.

The other element as content of teaching materials can be considered is

technology, such as OHP, slides, video and audio, tape recorders, video cameras,
computer software, and visual aids. These elements influence the content and the
procedures of learning. The varieties content of material can make the students
learn to deal with different forms. Cunningsworth in Richards (2001:258) gives
criteria as a set of guidelines in making the materials;
1. They should correspond to learners’ needs. They should match the aims and
objectives of the language program.
2. They should reflect the uses (present or future) that learners will make of the
language. Textbooks should be chosen that will help equip students to use
language effectively for their own purposes.
3. They should take account of students’ needs as learners and should facilitate
their learning processes, without dogmatically imposing a rigid “method”.
4. They should have a clear role as a support for learning. Like teacher, they
should mediate between the target language and learner.

Material can be in the form of textbook, a workbook, a cassette, a CD-

Rom, a video, a photocopied handout, a newspaper, a paragraph written on

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 Fitriah 48

whiteboard and everything which presents or informs about the language being
learned. Henceforth, anything that is used to help the teacher to teach language
learners. The last important material that must be given to the students is
evaluation. Evaluation as the systematic appraisal of the value of materials in
relation to teachers’ objectives during the teaching process and to the objectives
of the learner using materials during learning process in the classroom. Tomlinson
(1998:3) states that evaluation refers to attempts to measure the value of materials
and it forms can be pre-use and therefore focused on predictions of potential value.
It can be whilst- use and therefore focus on awareness and description of what
learner are actually doing in whilst the materials are being used. Evaluation can
also be post-use and therefore focused on analysis of what happened as a result of
using materials.

D. The Teacher’s Role in Implementing Teaching Material

Teacher in the class room can be the main actor that presented the
comfortable condition. Graves Kathleen (2010: 171) argues; “teacher is the
person with the most powerful role in the classroom. The initial structuring of
learning communities depends on the teacher’s using her agency to change the
relationships and roles in the classroom”. The impact of the modernization of
education and society has been to multiply and diversify the roles of the teacher
such that many strategies or method that different from the conventional one.
Teacher demanded to prepare the objective of learning. Kohenen in Nunan
(1999:7) states that the potential for a learning atmosphere of shared partnership, a
common purpose, and a joint management of learning and in the classrooms
infused with the vision promised by experiential learning behavior is a joint
responsibility of the whole class, and that the teacher is only one member within
that class.
Teaching learning process in the classroom cannot separate from the
materials prepared in instruction class. The materials function as a channel
between teacher and learners. The role of the teacher in an integrated teaching and
learning that is to assist students with making connections and therefore finding
meaning of an educational process. The teacher communicates with and obtains
feedback from students in a manner that enhances student learning and
understanding, so, material used to help both teacher and student to run the
learning process well.

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E. Conclusion
Teaching is any activities done in the class room as learning ways. Most
people think about teaching process as the overt presentation of information by
teachers to learners. But the real teaching learning process is depends on how the
teacher and the learner feel comfortable in that situation.
Ideally, teaching materials will be tailored to the content in which they are
being used, to the students in whose class they are being used, and the teacher.
Teaching materials come in many shapes and sizes, but they all in common the
ability to support students learning. So, teaching material can support students
learning and increase student success, because instructional materials for effective
teaching. The quality of those materials directly impact to the quality of teaching.
Knowing how to find the best instructional materials is a valuable skill for a
teacher to have. Materials chosen in teaching learning include textbooks that
extent to which a curriculum will involve teacher made materials which content of
additional activities and exercises, handouts, charts, review sheets, etc.

REFERENCES
Brown. H. Douglas. (2007). An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.
Third Edition.Longman.
Burkill Bob & Eaton Ray. (2011). Developing Teaching and Learning. Cambridge
University Press.
Ellis,R. (1990). Instructed Second Language Acquisition. Oxford ; Basil
Blackwell.
Graves Kathleen. (2010). The Language Curriculum: A Social Contextual
Perspective. In Innovation in Language Curriculum. Published by Deakin
University, Geelong Australia.
McDonough and Shaw Christopher. (2003). Materials and Methods in ELT A
teacher Guide. 2nd Ed. Blackwell Publishing.
Nunan David. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Heile & Heinle
Publisher.
O’Neill,R. (1990). Why use textbooks? In R.Rossner and R. Balitho, (Eds),
Currents in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.
Richards. J. (2001). Curriculum Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge,
UK. Cambridge University Press.
Tomlinson Brian. (1998). Materials Development in Language Teaching.
Cambridge University Press.

Itqan, Vol. VI, No. 2, Juli - Desember 2015