The Needs of Character Education Based on Fairy-tale Textbook Development for Junior High Students in Semarang Regency

This research is aimed at describing teachers’ and students’ needs in terms of character education based on fairy-tale textbook development. It is intended to discover the level of junior high teachers’ and students’ needs regarding textbooks, especially in Semarang regency. The method used is qualitative–descriptive research. The data collection was conducted by carrying out interviews, observation, questionnaires, and analyses. Data analysis was an interactive-cycle model through a data presentation and a conclusion. The results showed that the teachers and students in junior high schools need sufficient character education based on fairy-tale textbooks, which requires the following aspects: content, presentation, language and readability, and graphics. Based on the findings, it is suggested that the availability of character education based on fairy-tale textbooks for teachers and students in junior high schools in Semarang needs developing.   Keywords: character education, fairy tale textbook development, interactive-cycle mode

The Importance of Needs Assessment for the Implementation of E-Learning in a Language Program

This study describes the importance of needs assessment in the teaching of Indonesian Language as a Second/Foreign Language e-learning program. Needs assessment is one of the main investigative tools used by institutions for the identification of actual needs, gaps, and hidden parts of the system and other activities. From this investigation, curriculum developers obtain various pieces of information on linguistics background, learning style preferences, teaching strategies, students’ motivations, and also students’ commitment in their involvement in the e-learning language program. Needs assessment will help teachers to analyze the learning materials, content, and media for their e-learning programs, and in turn will be instrumental in developing their e-learning strategies. A needs assessment can also provide information about the technology and other support services needed for the e-learning programs. Through a comprehensive needs assessment process, an institution can establish e-learning goals.   Keywords: e-learning, needs assessment progra

Book Sharing: Parents' Read Aloud Activities in Supporting Emergent Reading and ARTS for Early Literacy

The golden age is an important period when children receive a wide range of knowledge. It takes place between two years of age to six. The initial process of early literacy starts also here in which several components state meaningful supports; vocabulary, print knowledge, phonological awareness, emergent reading, and arts. Three previous studies for this article show that the integration between learning at home and at school for the supports is not yet integrated. Based on the research results that are relevant to this study, it was found that children whose parent were optimizing the chance of receiving a stimulus language well, will grow into adults who are capable in terms of language as well as having a tendency to more easily understand the readings five times greater than adults who in his childhood did not receive the same stimuli. The general objective of this study was to find the concept of activity-based meaningful language activities either through sub reading, storytelling, dialogue, as well as arts of toddlers. The specific objective of this study was to: Discover how the existing conditions in similar processes and guidelines that are applied in other countries as a comparison; Finding the design and guidelines for teacher and parent in facilitating emergent reading and arts; Finding the effectiveness of on-going literacy learning activities. Mix methods applied here took 40 teachers and 40 parents lived in Madiun and surroundings. The first questionnaire and observation for both participants showed what real emergent and arts activities for their children and also whether those acts were standardized or not. The second part was sharing the program and figuring the guidelines which lead them act as the target shared. And the last one was the evaluation which promoted observation, interviews and documents from the progress

The Use of Visual AIDS as Multimodal Teaching Media to Enhance Students' Skill of Writing

Multimodal teaching media is necessary to be used in this digital era since text can appear in various forms and do not have to always be in writing consisting of rows of letters or characters. Teachers are expected to use such modes that can help them build an active, effective, and interactive learning process. This research was conducted because of the problems faced by students in writing descriptive text and the class situation during the learning process. The use of visual aids as the multimodal teaching media used by the teacher is expected can solve those problems. Therefore, this research aims at (1) improving the students' skill of writing descriptive text using visual aids; and (2) describing the class climate when visual aids are implemented in teaching writing descriptive text. The method used in this research is classroom action research. In this research, the researcher uses qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques. This research used students' writing scores (pre-test and post-test) as quantitative data. The qualitative data were analyzed using assembling the data, coding the data, comparing the data, building interpretation and reporting the outcomes. The quantitative data were analyzed by the result of the test (the comparison of mean score of pre-test and post-test). The research findings show that: the use of visual aids improves the students' writing skill and the use of visual aids has a good impact on the class climate. Visual media changes the class condition to become more exciting and conducive; the students also become more active and interactive during the learning process