DEVELOPING ISLAMIC-CONTENT BASED READING COMPREHENSION MATERIALS FOR ISLAMIC HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

This study was motivated by the needs for an appropriate reading comprehension material for the students of the English Education Department (EED) in Islamic Higher Education (1)to describe the profile of the present textbooks used by EED in IHE; (2)to describe the quality of the present textbooks used in EED of IHE; (3) to get the deeply information on the needs to design ICRCM;(4) to construct the prototype model of ICRCM; and (5) to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the prototype model. This study has used R&D which was conducted in three phases. The first was the exploration phase which consists of evaluating the quality of present textbooks used in IHE in West Sumatera, and to analyze the needs for the ICRCM textbook. The second was the prototype development phase where the prototype model was constructed, evaluated, and tried out. The last was expert validation in which experts and practitioners were involved to review the model in order to help the refinements. The results of the research indicated that the qualities of the present textbooks were fair. Meanwhile, the result of need analysis pointed out that the lecturers, students, and heads of the EED need the model of ICRBM. In the prototype devel opment phase, the draft of ICRCM was carefully constructed. It was designed using skill-based reading, authentic materials, Islamic-character building, intensive & extensive reading activities, and collaborative learning. Furthermore, the results of field tryout revealed that the students enjoy reading ICRCM in the classroom. They felt that they were motivated to read ICRCM. Finally, the results of experts’ and practitioner’s judgment showed that the reading textbook needs to be revised in terms of mechanical aspect, grammatical points and teacher’s guide. The research findings conclude that the use of ICRCM in the IHE context empirically can improve students’ motivation to read, increase their reading performance, and build their Islamic characters. These findings recommend that ICRCM could be adopted as RC materials in teaching RC at EED of IHE in West Sumatera because it had strong pedagogical justification.