DEVELOPING A PROTOTYPE OF

WEB-BASED MANGA COMICS

AS ENGLISH WRITING SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
FOR TENTH GRADERS
Paramita Anggraini
Email: angginchan@gmail.com
Bambang Yudi Cahyono
Email: yudic2000@yahoo.com
Utami Widiati
Email: uwidiati@yahoo.com

State University of Malang

ABSTRACT: This research aimed at developing a prototype of web-based

manga comics as English writing supplementary materials for tenth graders of
senior high school. The research design was Research and Development. The
setting was class X-5 of SMA Negeri I Bojonegoro. This research used the
validation questionnaire for the experts and teacher and the try-out questionnaire
as the instruments to collect the data. The results of the research show that the
prototypes of the manga comics were considered good; however, the aspect in the
effectiveness of the website as its media had to be revised in terms of the display
and the link of the website. After the revision, the prototypes were tried out and
final products proved to be good enough to be used as English writing
supplementary materials for the tenth graders of senior high school.

Keywords: manga comics, web-based writing supplementary materials

ABSTRAK: Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan prototipe komik

manga berbasis web sebagai materi ajar tambahan pembelajaran writing bahasa
Inggris untuk kelas X SMA. Penelitian ini menerapkan model penelitian dan
pengembangan (R&D). Setting penelitian ini adalah kelas X-5 di SMA Negeri I
Bojonegoro. Instrumen penelitian meliputi kuesioner validasi untuk pakar dan
guru, serta kuesioner uji coba siswa. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa
prototipe materi komik manga dipertimbangkan memenuhi kriteria; akan tetapi,
aspek keefektifan website sebagai medianya disarankan untuk direvisi pada
bagian display dan web-link. Setelah revisi, prototipe diujicoba dan produk akhir
dibuktikan memenuhi kriteria untuk digunakan sebagai materi ajar tambahan
pembelajaran writing bahasa Inggris untuk kelas X SMA.

Keywords: komik manga, materi ajar tambahan writing berbasis web

In English teaching and learning, there are a lot of materials and media
available to make the teaching and learning more fun, authentic, and effective.
Some examples of instructional materials include comics, novels, newspaper, and
so on; while the examples of the media are the internet, games, song, and so on.
Manga is one of those materials offered in this study to make the teaching and
learning more interesting. Manga is a Japanese comic book or Japanese illustrated
comic with Japanese style of drawing. It is one of comics genres. It has been
known as interesting and important materials for students in learning language
and literature. Manga is easy to access and becomes well-known around the world
since it has been spread through the internet as its media to introduce manga.

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A preliminary field study done at the research subjects took class X-5 of
SMA Negeri 1 Bojonegoro shows that the students in research subject school are
interested in engaging manga comics into the lesson. Initially, the general
problems in English teaching and learning in Indonesia tend to deal with the
limited class time and uninteresting materials. This subject school also deals with
the limited class time problem and the unavailability of interesting materials
which make the students unmotivated in English lesson. The results of the
preliminary study show that the students indicate approval and interest with the
introduction of such a genre in class which motivates them during lessons. Hence,
the researcher tries to blend manga comics into English learning, precisely in
teaching EFL in Indonesia.
Many journal articles and research have also contributed the potential of
manga comics as one of comics genres to serve as educational materials and
medium. However, many different points of views often appeared which make the
use of manga comics in the classroom as debatable issues. An example of positive
point of views about manga comics is stated in Murakami and Bryce (2009) that
By combining visual and verbal texts with stories, manga is able to make
difficult topics easy to understand. In their study, manga is seen as a
representative of Japanese culture. The study introduce unexplored area of manga
that is the subset of educational manga in which it informs the reader with
valuable real-world information while entertaining with engaging stories and
characters. Kaneko (2008; in Unser-Schutz, 2011) mentions that the familiarity
students have with the materials may allow learners to become more engaged than
with the text-only materials. Thus it can be concluded that manga comics have a
strong sense of context as visual medium because the drawings make clear who is
speaking, to whom it is spoken, and in what situations. As additional information,
the researcher found in KOMPAS newspaper, Arif (2012) provides two examples
of 4-panels manga comics in his article made by Hanii Nayu and Matsumoto
Yuka which are being used to educate about disaster as well.
In this study, the researcher specifically takes manga comics as the topic of
her present study in ELT because of its availability. In fact, manga comics are
more accessible to the reader. Manga comics are relatively inexpensive in the
market or we can also download it from the internet which makes it accessible.
They are easier to catch and usually very neatly organized. Its high-quality
artwork is also attractive to engage the readers imaginations.
This study is also inspired by the research done by several researchers about
the use of manga comics in ELT. Ogawa (2003), in her article, mentions that
educational manga can make English, particularly Business English, relevant,
accessible, and enjoyable. Quek (2005) studied the application of manga in
reading comprehension lesson among Singaporean upper primary students. The
results of the study show that the students feel that manga relates their in-school
literature to their out-of school literature and that such incorporation motivates
them during the lesson. In addition, the research done by Rahmawati (2014) also
contributes the text-less manga comics to improve the students writing skill. This
classroom action research applied the original manga comics, entitled Naruto, as
an example to help the students improve their writing.
In this study, the researcher tries to apply manga comics as instructional
materials focusing on English writing. This idea is based on the real problems that
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happened in the chosen research subject school, namely SMA Negeri I

Bojonegoro, in which teaching English writing in the subject school was difficult
to conduct satisfactorily and considered as the most difficult skill based on the
interview with the teacher and the preliminary field study.
Indeed, it is not easy to make students able to write well since it is difficult
to generate ideas spontaneously in the limited class time. Many students read
fluently, but find it difficult to write. Many students complain that they do not
know what to write. They may have ideas, but they lack the written language
skills to create a beginning of the story, follow a sequence of their ideas and draw
the writing to a logical conclusion. Concerning this problem, Cahyono (2001)
expects that the teacher gives intervention during the writing process up until the
students are able to generate ideas into a piece of writing product. Thus, this
research tends to help the learners to generate the ideas in free writing (in this
study, the researcher focuses on narrative genre) with the help of manga comics.
In short, we can say that manga comics can encourage the learners to develop
writing skills because it can give them a chance to develop skills in storytelling
and learning about literary devices which helps them to generate engaging plots
and write better dialogues for the characters.
Nevertheless, indeed, there is no available manga comics produced in
Indonesia for the students in high school level for English lesson. Manga comics
originally from Japan are often well-known for the gender-biased comics because
sometimes it consists of stories with themes in which one of the genders is being
stereotyped or with discourteous or inappropriate illustrations that may distract the
students focus. Thus, the researcher proposes to make her own manga comics
production to deal with the problems.
However, to produce manga comics for writing lesson in large quantity will
cost lots of funds and they can only be used once. Thus, apart from manga comics
in printed form, the digitized (web-based) manga comics have emerged as a new
medium. Digitized manga comics are the results of the blending between the
manga comics and the web itself. As we know, in the current era, globalization
and the digital information age are reforming the way we live and this trend is
likely to continue. The digital application has entered the education and this
enable the information and learning interaction to be more lively. It is highly
possible to make an innovation and integrate ICT (Information and
Communication Technology) to the curriculum as Webster (2008) has mentioned
that the new educational technologies need to be supported by innovative
pedagogical approaches which in turn lead to collaboration, communication, and
mobility.
By the existence of that chance, learning process is no longer limited by
space and time; thus we can do blended learning by combining face-to-face
instruction with computer-mediated instruction. In this modern era, integrating
internet as the part of teaching and learning process is very essential. It means that
the teachers are challenged to use the internet as a source of knowledge and a tool
to deliver materials to the students.
Dealing with the issues mentioned above, this study is directed to develop
web-based manga comics as English writing supplementary materials for tenth
graders to overcome the problems in the limited class time and uninteresting
materials which make the students unmotivated and lack of writing ideas in
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English writing lesson. Therefore, it is expected that the developed products can
make the students more active in English writing outside the lesson time and can
help the students overcome the problems in generating ideas of writing in
enjoyable way.

METHOD
This study was conducted in the form of Research and Development
(R&D). The setting of the research was class X-5 of SMA Negeri I Bojonegoro.
The product development procedures consisted of five stages: (1) the pre-
development, (2) the development of the first draft, (3) the product validation by
the experts and teacher, (4) the product try-outs, and (5) the development of the
final product. The research instruments were the validation questionnaire for the
experts and teacher, and the students try-outs questionnaire. The products were
revised based on the results of the product validation and the try-outs.

THE RESULTS OF THE DEVELOPMENT

The analysis of the experts and teachers validation showed that the
prototypes of the materials were valid and considered good enough to be tried out
to the students; therefore, there were no further improvement. The results of the
validation indicate there was no revision for the developed materials.
In addition, according to the teacher, the product was good and interesting.
However, the teacher mentioned that the covers were not really interesting so the
teacher gave suggestion to make it more interesting even though the covers had
represented the story well and had been considered good and valid.
Meanwhile, some sub-aspects of the prototypes in the effectiveness of the
website aspect were revised and revalidated based on the experts and the teachers
validation. Those sub-aspects were described below.

The Display of the Website

The media expert and the teacher commented that the display of the
website should be revised in some points.

Fonts
First sub-aspect was the fonts. It was mentioned that the fonts were not
really readable because they were too small. The fonts should be clear enough to
read so that the users would not have any difficulties in zooming the website
every time they read the materials online. Thus, the researcher gave the text-sizer
tool in the website to deal with the fonts size which was too small and not
readable. This helped the users to be able to control the size of the fonts inside the
website as they like.

Images
The second sub-aspect was the images display inside the website. The
expert and the teacher mentioned that the images did not really display correctly.
The images size was too small and it made the images and dialogues could not be
seen clearly. The images should have enough resolution and size so that it could
be seen clearly. The researcher thus increased the size of the images by increasing
the images resolution into bigger size and changing the type of the images from
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JPEG to PNG file format to make the images clearer and had higher quality.

Web display
The last sub-aspect in display was that the web display could not be
accessed from mobile devices. Since the products in this research were meant to
cope with the problems in limited class time and places so that it could be
accessed anytime and anywhere, the web should display correctly in the mobile
devices as well and was not only limited in personal computer. It was because the
picture was uploaded in the flash format which was not compatible for several
devices. Therefore, the researcher changed the images from flash format into the
html format which was more compatible and accessible through any devices.

The link of the Website

The experts and the teacher mentioned that there were some broken links and it
made them hardly open the link of the website. These broken links made the
validation spent more time trying to open the website. For the better use, they
suggested the researcher to re-check the broken links. Thus, the researcher tried to
fix the broken links so that the links can be accessible and functional again.

CONCLUSIONS
Based on the research findings, the products proved to be good enough to
be used as English writing supplementary materials for tenth graders of senior
high school.
The final product of this study is the materials prototypes of 3 short web-
based manga comics and the instructional website as its media which offer several
kinds of interesting activities to be done by students. The sample of the final
prototypes can be seen in Appendices 1a and 1b, and be accessed at edumanga.tk.
Nevertheless, there are also some limitations in developing this product.
After conducting this study, the researcher finds that to develop web-based manga
comics is very demanding. It consumes a lot of time if the teachers are not
accustomed to drawing comics and developing websites. It is also difficult to
provide the topics which students like as well. In addition, producing a good
product requires funding.
Moreover, the product had only been partly tried out to the limited number
of students in a limited time and it is merely prototypes which have not covered
all of the materials for all graders of senior high school, so the effectiveness of the
product has not been proved yet for practical used in larger sample.

RECOMMENDATIONS
To sustain the availability of the developed website, the researchers are to
develop other manga comics products in the same or other English skills as well.
This is to maintain the existence of the developed website as instructional media
and the developed web-based manga comics as instructional materials so that the
terms of web-based manga comics can be more broadly known in education.
English teachers are suggested to use easier and more enjoyable materials
and media in teaching English. In this case, the web-based manga comics can be
an alternative. It is also advisable that teachers develop the materials with various
topics and genres not only for tenth graders, but also for higher grades.
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To overcome the problems in the drawing and the topic selection, the
English teacher can collaborate with other teachers. This can be done by asking
the art teachers to help the drawing of the comics and other teachers to help
finding interesting topics for the students. As for the website development, the
teacher can ask the IT teacher to develop the website.
Future researchers are also expected to develop other kinds of materials
besides web-based manga comics for writing supplementary materials and media
because materials and media that suit the students needs, interest, and level are
not always available.

REFERENCES
Arif, A. October 18th 2012. Pendidikan Bencana Lewat Manga. Kompas, p. 14.

Cahyono, B. Y. 2001. Second Language Writing and Rhetoric. Malang: State

University of Malang Press.

Murakami, S., & Bryce, M. 2009. Manga as an educational medium. The

International Journal of the Humanities, (Online), 07 (10): 45-55, (http://
www.mq.edu.au/pubstatic/public/download/?id=42361), accessed on March
20th 2014.

Ogawa, E. 2012. Educational Manga: An Effective Medium for English Learning.

In N. Sonda & A. Krause (Eds.), JALT2012 Conference Proceedings.
(Online), Tokyo: JALT, (http://jalt-publications.org/files/pdf-article/
jalt2012-003.pdf), accessed on January 14th 2014.

Quek, P. J. 2005. An Exploratory Study of the Use of Manga in Reading

Comprehension Lessons for the Upper Primary. UNESCO-NIE Centre for
Arts Research in Education, (Online), (http://www.unesco-care.nie.edu.sg/
research/exploratory-study-use-manga-reading-comprehension-lessons-
upper-primary), accessed on January 23th 2015.

Rahmawati, E. 2014. Improving Students Writing Skill Through Textless Comics

(A CAR of the Eight Grade Students of SMP Qaryah Thayyibah Salatiga in
the Academic Year of 2013/2014). Unpublished Thesis. Salatiga: English
Department. Educational Faculty. State Institute for Islamic Studies
(STAIN) Salatiga.

Unser-Schutz, G. 2011. Manga as a linguistic resource for learning. In A. Stewart

(Ed.), JALT2010 Conference Proceedings, (Online), Tokyo: JALT,
(http://jalt-publications.org/files/pdf-article/jalt2010proc-41.pdf), accessed
on April 20th 2013.

Webster, R., & Murphy, D. 2008. Enhancing learning through technology:

Challenges and responses. In Reggie K., Robert F., Philip T. & F. T. Chan
(Eds.), Enhancing Learning through Technology: Research on Emerging
Technologies and Pedagogies, pp. 1-16. London: World Scientific
Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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Malang, July 15th, 2015

Advisor, Researcher,

Prof. Bambang Yudi Cahyono, M.Pd Paramita Anggraini

NIP 19640318 198701 1 001 NIM 130221818760
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Appendix 1a: The Sample of Final Websites Prototype

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Appendix 1b: The Sample of the Final Materials Prototype

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