PROTOTYPING A WEB-PUBLISHED ACADEMIC ENGLISH COURSEBOOK FOR INDONESIAN PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHER EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM STUDENTS

Abstract

This publication addresses the prototyping phase of a web-published academic English coursebook, which is exclusively designed and developed to assist the 6th semester primary school teacher education study program students at Universitas Negeri Makassar in learning academic English. Large-scale social restriction due to Covid-19 pandemic, which restricts any form of regular face-to-face meeting, and the fact that an English coursebook has not been developed yet at the locus of this study led the authors to set this as both an important and urgent goal to be reached through design-based research, which comprised (1) preliminary study; (2) prototyping; (3) assessment; and (4) systematic reflection. In prototyping the artefact, standard web programming languages including PHP, HTML, and CSS were synergized. The samples of this study were 5 classes consisting of 125 6th semester students majoring in primary school teacher education study program at Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia. Through iterative cycle of prototyping, the findings of this study provide an ideal design of a web-published academic English coursebook exclusively addressed to solve a contextual educational issue detected in the locus of this research, as mandated by literature on design-based research. Besides, this publication discusses ideas of web design and development that work for academic English learning purposes. In addition, this publication also deals with the effectiveness issue of the web-published academic English coursebook in assisting non-English major students in learning academic English through online distance learning delivery mode. This publication theoretically contributes to the domain of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) and instructional learning design.