The Development of the English Content-Based Reading Materials for Buddhist Student Monks

Abstract

The objectives of this study are 1) to develop the English content-based reading materials for Buddhist student monks, 2) to examine the attitude of student monks towards the quality of the English content-based reading materials, and 3) to examine the attitude of teachers towards the quality of the English content-based reading materials. The study was conducted in 6 stages starting from the identification of needs to create materials to the evaluation of the effectiveness of the developed materials. The participants of 42 student monks and 3 English teachers were purposefully selected from the Education Department of Wat Phra Dhammakaya in academic year 2017. Instruments used were semi-structured interview, needs analysis questionnaires, and evaluation questionnaires. The qualitative data was analyzed by the content analysis. The statistics used to analyze the quantitative data were frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The findings revealed that the English content-based reading materials for Buddhist monks were effectively developed by using material development framework of Tomlinson (2011) embedded with Six-T’s approach of Stoller and Grabe (2017), and the quality was the academic and physical aspects and the effectiveness in enhancing reading comprehension. In terms of the quality of academic and physical aspects, student monks had positive attitude towards 6 criteria including content, organization of content, presentation of content, language use, activities applied, and layout and design, and teachers had positive attitude towards 7 criteria 6 of which were exactly the same as those of student monks plus the criterion of teachers’ manual. This study clearly demonstrated theoretical processes of developing instructional materials of good quality and could be an example research to illustrate the connection between instructional materials developing and English language learning research for teachers, materials developers, and researchers in the field.