DESIGNING MODELS OF MEDIA OF LITERACY FOR TEACHING ENGLISH FOR YOUNG LEARNERS Siti Mariam IAIN Walisongo Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia [email protected]

Abstract: Learning activity in early classes namely students of elementary school are defied activities for teachers. Beside skill of class management, a teacher should be expected to master materials that will be taught by him/her. Literacy in early class is a foundation for next literacy skill. The importance, literacy not only is seen from the skill, but the most important thing is how students’ attitude towards literacy and how far their motivation in active participating in literacy activities.To enhance young learners” English competence is needed good media to support this purpose. Therefore the researcher is going to create literacy media for teaching English for young learner. This research is aimed to find the answer to the following research questions : Exploration Phase. 1) Can media of literacy improve young learners ’ English competence? 2)Which of media of media are potentially be used to improve young learners’ English competence? 3)To what extent is media of literacy needed by English teachers? Prototype Development Phase. 4) How should media of literacy for teaching English for young learners be constructed? 5) How high is the effectiveness of using media of literacy for teaching English for young learners? Field Assessment Phase. 6)To what extent can the models of media of literacydraft be used to enhance young learners’ English competence for young learners? The research method used Research and Development approach. The product of the reseach are Big Books, Pictures Media and Story Calender.

Keywords: English language teaching, media of literacy, young learners

INTRODUCTION Based on critical age theory, teaching English should be started during the critical age, which is called as a golden age. People believe that at this age children can acquire the language better than when they start learning it at the later age (after puberty). Indonesian government has also realized the importance of giving English to young age children and they have already considered that English should be given at the elementary level. However teaching English to children will be different based on the context. In the society

where English is a second language, it will be different from teaching English where it as a foreign language like in Indonesia. Indonesia is a multi cultural country that gives impacts such as various dialects, culture and needs. Due to this fact, any educational institutions should take some considerations before deciding to provide English lesson to elementary school children. They should consider whether they have made good preparation such as good models (teachers), teaching materials, teaching methods, assessment, and the role of multiple

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intelligences. A good model is very important to give correct input to the children who come from the multilingual society with different dialects. The teacher (model) should also know how to transfer their knowledge not only on the language itself but also on the culture of the language. Another important thing to consider is material. Not all materials which are available in the market are applicable to Indonesian context because most of the materials are designed for ESL context. The next consideration is teaching method. Even though there are a good model and applicable materials for teaching English in Indonesia, without appropriate teaching method they will be useless. The last consideration is the role of using media in learning process so that English learning becomes more effective and meaningful. All of the considerations above should be without good preparation mentioned above teaching English will not give any contribution to the children as young learners. To enhance young learners” English competence is needed good media to support this purpose. Therefore the researcher is going to create literacy media for teaching English for young learner. LITERATURE REVIEW Literacy is the use of socially, historically, and culturally – situated practices of creating and interpreting meaning through texts. It entails at least a tacit awareness of the relationships between textual conventions and their contexts of use and, ideally, the ability to reflect critically on those relationships. Because it is purpose – sensitive, literacy is dynamic – not static – and variable across and within discourse communities and cultures. It draws on a wide range of cognitive abilities, on knowledge of written and spoken language, on knowledge of genres, and on cultural knowledge. Definitions like this one may be useful as a conceptual starting point, but they are often difficult to translate into the concrete realities of classroom teaching and curriculum design. Seven principles of a sociocognitive view of literacy

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1. Literacy involves interpretation. Writers and readers participate in double acts of interpretation - the writer interprets the world (events, experiences, ideas, and so on), and the reader then interprets the writer’s interpretation in terms of his or her own conception of the world. 2. Literacy involves collaboration. Writers write for an audience, even if they write for themselves. Their decisions about what must be said, and what can go without saying, are based on their understanding of their audience. Readers in turn must contribute their motivation, knowledge, and experience in order to make the writer’s text meaningful. 3. Literacy involves conventions. How people read and write texts is not universal, but governed by cultural conventions that evolve through use and are modified for individual purposes. 4. Literacy involves cultural knowledge. Reading and writing function within particular systems of attitudes, beliefs, customs, ideas, and values. Readers and writers operating from outside a given cultural system risk misunderstanding or being misunderstood by those operating on the inside of the cultural system. 5. Literacy involves problem solving. Because words are always embedded in linguistic and situational contexts, reading and writing involve figuring our relationships between words, between larger units of meaning, and between texts and real or imagined worlds. 6. Literacy involves reflection and self – reflection. Readers and writers think about language and its relations to the world and themselves. 7. Literacy involves language use. Literacy is not just about writing systems, nor just about lexical and grammatical knowledge; it requires knowledge of how language is used in spoken and written contexts to create discourse.

The Multifaceted Dimensions of English Linguistics, Literature, and Education

These principles, although here framed in terms of reading and writing, are not unique to literacy, but can be applied broadly to human communication in general. In fact, the seven principles can be summarized by the macro principle: literacy involves communication. This seven – point linkage between literacy and communication has important implications for language teaching, as it provides a bridge to span the gap that so often separates introductory ‘communicative’ language teaching and advanced ‘literary’ teaching. By practicing literary in a non – native language, students learn not only about vocabulary and grammar but also about discourse and the processes by which it is created. They learn new, alternative ways of organizing their thought and their expression, ways which go beyond the learning of facts about the second culture. Literacy is therefore not only relevant for students with literary aspirations –but essential for all language learners, and at all levels of language study. Shifting Paradigms in Language Teaching Foreign language teaching has long relied on written texts as a source of language input. Until relatively recently, however, the sentence has been the privileged unit of meaning and analysis. The grammar – translation method of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, illustrated grammatical principles via exemplary sentences. The pedagogical goal was to recode sentences written in the foreign language into one’s mother tongue, with heavy emphasis placed on accuracy and completeness. During the audiolingual era, from the 1940s to the 1960s, the emphasis shifted to spoken language and dialogues were used as language models, but the individual sentence remained the focus of repetition and drills. Again, formal accuracy remained paramount. In the 1960s, with the advent of ‘cognitive code learning’ theory (following Chomsky’s rejection of behavioristic models of language learning in the late 1950s), teachers’ goals gradually shifted from instilling accurate language habits, to fostering learners’ mental construction of a

second language system. Rule learning was reintroduced, but still only at the level of the individual sentence. Indeed, even today, many introductory level foreign language courses are organized around a planned sequence of grammatical structures that are exemplified in sample sentences for intensive practice. It has long been recognized, however, that communicative language use involves a good deal more than the ability to understand and produce structurally – correct sentences. In the 1960s, British linguist Michael Halliday and American sociolinguist Dell Hymes argued that the individual sentence was too narrow a lens to look through if one wanted to understand language as it is used in social practice. Because the structure of a given sentence is influenced by the larger textual structures in which it is embedded, Halliday argued that texts, not sentences, ought to be the basic unit of linguistic analysis. Halliday and Hasan (1976) define ‘text’ as ‘any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that forms a unified whole’. Therefore a text can range from a single word (for example, a stop sign ) to a lengthy novel or report. Hymes, who coined the term ‘communicative competence’, shifted attention from grammatical well – formedness to the appropriateness of language use in real social contexts. His position is aptly expressed in his well – known remark ‘There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless (Hymes, 1971:10). Halliday’s & Hymes’ contributions to a broader, socially – based view of language teaching. During the 1970s and 1980s, language educators called for a pedagogy that shifted emphasis away from language usage to language use (Widdowson, 1978); from language as code to language as communication in social context (Breen and Candlin 1980). Indeed, in the context of teaching literacy, this meant an exension of focus beyond text (i.e. stretches of cognitive processes involves in its realization as an expressive or communicative act ). Although the influential models of communicative competence developed by

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Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983), Savignon (1983), and Bachman (1990) all included written as well as oral discourse abilities in their scope, communicative language teaching has, on the whole, focused predominantly on face – to – face, spoken communication. Communicative teaching programs have largely succeeded in their goal of promoting learners’ interactive speaking abilities. They have tended to be somewhat less successful, however, in developing learners’ extended discourse competence and written communication skills – areas of language ability that are extraordinarily important in academic settings. An early and strong proponent of developing language learners’ ability to handle written discourse, Widdowson (1978) argued that interpretation underlies all communicative language abilities. Because meanings are not inherent in language itself, but need to be worked out, learners should have guided experience in selecting, organizing, and interpreting linguistic clues through the creation and re – creation of discourse. Key to Widdowson’s scheme for developing learners’ interpretative ability was an integrated approach to reading and writing : “What the learner needs to know how to do is to compose in the act of writing, comprehend in the act of reading, and to learn techniques of reading by writing and techniques of writing by reading. Widdowson’sintegrated approach involved cycles of reading and writing that relied on two primary exercise types : rhetorical transformation (for example, reformulating directions into description and vice versa) and information transfer (for example, using tables drawings or other non verbal representations to mediate a transition from one form of discourse to another. The aim of these activities was ‘getting the learner to write something based on his reading and so to represent these two abilities as aspects of the same underlying interpreting process. Many of Widdowson’s ideas are echoed and extended in two, more recent books, Reading for Meaning by Janet Swaffar, Katherine Arens, and Heidi Byrnes, and Context and Culture in

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Language Teaching by Claire Krammsch. Both books articulate a vision of foreign language education that shifts emphasis from sentence – grammar, structure drills, and information retrieval to a more thoughtful mode of learning that involves students’ reflection on language and language and context, and specifically on the connections between the details of texts and students’ personal responses to those texts. Both books make the point that many approaches to language teaching have focused on linguistic form, without a simultaneous focus on the semantic and pragmatic consequences of form, leaving the links between discourse and culture insufficiently explored. Swaffar et al deal extensively with the cognitive dimensions of language learning. They question the teaching profession’s assumption that practice in speaking about concrete objects and events will eventually prepare learners to express and evaluate abstract ideas and concepts in the new language. Media play an important role in a teaching and learning process. Media are needed to reach the objectives of teaching learning process. As a teacher, we should use various media or teaching aids in giving the material to the students as stated by Harmer that “as a language teacher, we use a variety of teaching aids to explain language meaning and construction, engage students in a topic or as the basis of a whole activity”. According Gerlach and Elly, a medium is any person, material, or event that establishes conditions which enable learners or students to acquire knowledge, skills and attitude. In addition, Brown, defines media as the tools or physical things used by a teacher to facilitate the. From the definition above, the writer makes a conclusion that media are the tools, materials, or events that establish conditions used by a teacher to facilitate the instruction to acquire knowledge, skill and attitudes, and engage the learners in a topic or as the basis of a whole activity.

The Multifaceted Dimensions of English Linguistics, Literature, and Education

The teachers’ creativity in using media will increase the probability that students will learn more and the knowledge will retain better in their mind. Those are many mediathat can be used in a teaching learning process. Gerlach and Elly classify media in six general categories : 1. Picture Picture consists of photographs of any object or event, which may be larger or smaller than the object or event it represents. 2. Audio Recording Recording is made on magnetic tape, discs, motion picture, and soundtrack. These are reproductions of actual event or sound. 3. Motion Picture A motion picture is a moving image in color or black and white produced from live action or from graphic representation. 4. Television This category includes all types of audio video electronic distribution systems;Which eventually appear on television monitor. 5. Real things, simulation and model This category includes people, events, objects and imitation of real things. Imitation of real things can be used a substitution for the actual objects or event. They are, in fact, life itself, often in its natural settings. Simulation is the replication of real situation, which has been instruction designed to be as near the actual event or process as possible. Many media, including the computers, tape recordings, and motion pictures can be used for simulation. A model is replication or representation of reality. It is often in scale and may be miniature, exact size or an enlargement. 6. P r o g r a m a n d C o m p u t e r - A s s i s t e d Instruction Programs are sequences of information ( verbal, visual, or audio ) which are designed to elicit predetermined responses. The most common examples are programmed textbooks or instructional programs prepared for computers. From the categories above, not all of them can be applied in the classroom. According to Gerlach and Elly ( 1980 : 254 ), to select

the appropriate media, the teacher must consider the characteristics of the students which directly relate to the learning process, such as verbal abilities, visual and audio perception skills, experience, motivation, personality and social skills. Roles of Media in Teaching Learning Process The use of media in a teaching learning process is very important. Lacatis & Atkinson (1984) give a brief explanation on the roles of media or instructional media as follows : 1. To entertain Media can be used as recreation and enjoyment. It includes fictional stories and poem publishes in books and magazines; records; tapes and radio broadcast of music, music typically shown in motion pictures theaters; and comedies, dramas, and sporting events in television. 2. To inform The use of media can increase awareness or present facts. It includes newspapers, documentaries on radio and television, and advertisements in all media. 3. To instruct Media are used to take the viewer and listener from state of not knowing to one of knowing. From a state of poor performance to a state of competence. It includes motion pictures, slides, film strips records and audiotapes. Characteristic of Elementary School Students Learners are often described as children, young learners, adolescents, young adults or adults. Within education, the term children are generally used for learners between the ages of about two to fourteen. Students are generally described as young learners between the ages of about five to nine, and very young learners are usually between two and five. At what ages it is safe to call students adolescents are often uncertain, since the beginning of adolescence is bound up with physical and emotional changes rather than chronological age. However, this

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term tends to refer to the student from the ages of about twelve to seventeen, where the young adults are generally thought between sixteen and twenty. Piaget defines that young learners are the students who learn English as a local content subject at Elementary School that they are between six to twelve years old. Phillips said that young learners mean children from the first year of formal schooling ( five or six years old ) to eleven or twelve years of age. In addition, young learners are children which are 6 – 12 years old. According to the age, they can be divided into two groups, they are younger group ( 6 – 8 years old ), and older group ( 9 -12 years old ). According to the class level, they are divided into lower classes ( 1, 2, and 3 classes ), and upper classes ( 4, 5, and 6 classes). Based on the definition above, it can be concluded that young learners are children whose ages are between 6 – 12 years old. In this occasion, the writer discusses the upper classes, particularly the fourth, fifth and sixth grade. The Characteristics of Young Learners Everybody is different, either their characteristic of personality. Therefore, it is necessary for us to treat them in different treatments in order to make them feel convenient. In the same case, teaching English for elementary school level is also different with teaching English for students at the higher levels. The elementary school students are still called as children because their ages between 7 to 12 old.Some people say that children learn language faster than adults do.According to Mary Slattery and Jane Willis, children at that group have some general characteristics as follows : 1. They are learning to read and write in their own language. 2. They are developing as thinkers. 3. Understand the difference between the real and the imaginary. 4. They can plan and organize how best to carry out an activity.

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5. They can work with others and learn from others. 6. They can be reliable and take responsibility for class activities and routines. In addition, Wendy Scoot states some general characteristics of the students in elementary school are as follows : 1. They are competent users of mother tongue. 2. They can tell difference between fact and fiction. 3. They love to play and learn best when they enjoy themselves. But they also take themselves seriously and like to think what they are doing in real work. 4. They are enthusiastic and positive about learning. 5. They rely on the spoken as the physical would convey and understanding. 6. They are able to work with others and learn from others. 7. Their own understanding comes through eyes, hands and ears. The physical world is dominant at all times. 8. They have very short attention concentration span. From the characteristics above, the researcher can conclude that elementary school students are unique and very enthusiastic in understanding and learning everything. They lost interest more quickly in doing something, and they more like to have other children around them and sitting with others encourages cooperation. The teacher has to be flexible. It means that the teacher does not follow her lesson plan strictly but the teacher might improve the learning process based on the encountered situation. The teacher should provide a fun, cheerful, enjoyable classroom and provide an appropriate technique, game or media in order to be able to attain a successful activity. RESEARCH METHOD Research Design This study will use Research and Development (R & D). Development Model is basis to develop the product that will be produced. The

The Multifaceted Dimensions of English Linguistics, Literature, and Education

development model will be designed in this research is collaborative between conceptual model and procedural model. Conceptual model is an analytic model that mentions components of product, to analyze the components in detail and shows each component that will be developed (Depdiknas, 2007). So the steps are as follows: 1. Figure1: Designing Models of Literacy Media for Teaching English for Young Learners. a. Designing Models of Literacy Media for Teaching English for Young Learners b. Planning c. First Phase : Needs Analysis d. Second Phase : Product Development e. Data collection f. Expert’s Validation g. Data Analysis h. Third Phase : Testing Products : Product Revision i. Dissemination

Data is information material to give specific description of research objects. The activities of development research are not separated by data. In this development research, there are two kinds of data : 2. Primary Data This data are collected from source of data directly by the researcher. Primary data are also called authentic data or new up to date data. To obtain primary data, the researcher must collect them directly. Techniques of primary data collection use observation, interview, focus group discussion. 3. Secondary Data This data are collected from various sources namely previous relevant researches, books, journals, research reports, etc. CONCLUSION The products of this research and development are six kind of big books as media of literacy that have been proven effective media for enhancing young learners’ interest towards English.

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