Materials Suitability Of The General English Textbook Used at Sekolah Umum Perikanan Menengah (SUPM) Tegal

Abstract

In ELT classroom, textbook is choosen to be either significantly or slightly used. As teachers begin to teach in classroom, they are in charge of deciding whether to use, adapt, replace, omit or suplement the methods and materials used in the choosen textbook. This can be done by understanding the students needs and interests, aim and styles of learning, also their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, this study deals with finding out the students perception on the English textbook Get Along with English for Vocational Schools Grade XII. The data were collected through distributing a survey questionaire to elicit the perspective of 100 students of Sekolah Usaha Perikanan Menengah (SUPM) Tegal as the current users. Unstructured interview to the students were also taken to supplement the data. The questionnaire had been addapted from the checklist of evaluation criteria by Mukundan et al. (2011) in accordance with the textbook evaluation theory of Grant (1989) and Cunningsworth (1995). The findings revealed that the textbook satisfied the majority of students in most criteria. Meanwhile, the results also showed that the textbook has weak points in the case of physical durability, phonological aspects insufficiency, and the lack of its fun activities to attract students interests. A further investigation focuses on analysing the relation of language aspects, students motivation, and the learning achievement is suggested.