Developing ESP Reading Materials for Accounting Students

Abstract

Exposing abundance of English information related to students’ educational background knowledge can improve their competence in comprehending English texts. Thus, this study developed ESP reading materials for accounting students. It was aimed at finding out what kind of ESP reading materials should be developed to increase accounting students’ reading skill, and examining the validity, practicality, and potential effect of the developed ESP reading materials.The product was developed by using Akker covering the phases of analysis, design, evaluation and revision. Furthermore, formative evaluation proposed by Tessmer was used. This study involved 40 students selected by using purposive technique. The data were gathered from the results of validation sheet questionnaire of content and instructional design, students’ responses questionnaire, and reading comprehension test. The analysis of validation sheet questionnaire from two experts’ judgement indicated that the developed product had very high validity (3.61). Meanwhile, the results of students’ responses questionnaire showed that the average score in one-to-one evaluation was 3.3 and in small group evaluation was 3.5. It revealed that the product was denoted as practical in which both evaluations were in high practicality category. At last, the results of reading comprehension test showed that there was 64% of the students could pass the minimum mastery criterion. Thus, the findings indicated that ESP reading materials for accounting students can be determined had average potential effect after being implemented to the students in a real class. In other words, ESP reading materials developed in this study were potential effect enough to increase the students’ reading skill.