STUDENTS' NEEDS IN ENGLISH TEACHING MATERIALS FOR KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS

The aim of this study was to investigate the students‟ actual foreign language needs, namely : first, personal needs which focus on their personal information and second, learning needs covers five points, to be exact: learning attitude, learning preferences regarding activities, teaching media and topics in the EFL classroom, the gap between the target level and the present level of proficiency. A descriptive survey research design was used in this study. A set of smiley questionnaire were collected from for 113 kindergarteners from six kindergartens in Pringsewu District, Lampung Province, Indonesia. Furthermore, interviews with six homeroom teachers and six principals were conducted to get deeper data. Based on the results of needs analysis it is found that there are seven criteria should be considered by teachers or materials developers to develop the materials, namely 1) The materials should be appropriate to be used by the kindergarten students who are at the age of 6-7 years old; 2) The materials should not consist of the text and task that raise conflict of ethnic, religion, race, and inter-group relation; 3) The materials should contain the topics which they familiar with; 4) The materials should be appropriate to be used by the students that have limited vocabulary; 5) The materials should support students to increase their speaking skill step by step; 6) The materials should facilitate the students to use the language by using fun teaching techniques, such as playing games, singing, storytelling, role-play, etc.; 7) The materials should be completed with various teaching media, such as; puppets, flash cards, posters.