Evaluating reading-writing materials for office administration students

Abstract

Office Administration students at VHS require English reading-writing materials to assist them acquiring competencies as stated in SKNNI. The present study aimed to evaluate the existing materials and seek their relevance to SKNNI. The evaluation involved three English textbooks entitled Bahasa Inggris SMA/MA/SMK/MAK for Grade X, XI, and XII through checklist method. The authors used an evaluative checklist adapted from Cunningsworth (1995) and focused on three aspects — learning objective, language content, and text type. The results show that learning objectives in all assessed textbooks mismatch with the competencies defined in SKKNI. Likewise, language content (grammar and vocabulary) covered in those textbooks is irrelevant with language knowledge needed as the basics to attain the competencies in SKKNI. Then, the textbooks provide the kind of texts which are distinct from those required by SKKNI that must be business documents. Although one topic in textbook for Grade XII relates to office administration (about job application), it remains insufficient. To put it simply, the findings indicate that the three textbooks do not correspond to the national standards, so they are inappropriate for Office Administration students. Therefore, designing reading-writing materials based on SKNNI is the future action in response to the results of this study.

Keywords

• evaluation, reading-writing materials, office administration, skkni