THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONTENT-BASED READING MATERIALS FOR STUDENT MONKS: NEEDS ANALYSIS

Abstract

The objectives of this study were: 1) to identify the needs of the development of  English content-based reading materials for Buddhist student monks, and 2) to investigate the attitudes of student monks towards the quality of the developed materials. The study was conducted in 2 phases: 1) the identification of the needs of materials or problems to be solved by the creation of the materials, and 2) the investigation of the attitude towards the quality of the developed materials. The qualitative data was analyzed by content analysis. The statistics used to analyze the quantitative data were frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. In the first phase, qualitative data was obtained from the semi-structured interview and quantitative data was obtained from the needs analysis questionnaires distributed to 138 student monks, 6 English teachers, and 10 course administrators at the Education Department of Wat Phra Dhammakaya in the academic year 2017. The results showed problems with the lack of appropriate reading materials specifically designed for student monks and the needs of tasks, topics, and the physical appearance of the materials. In the second phase, quantitative data was obtained from the evaluation questionnaire distributed to 42 student monks. The results revealed that student monks with higher English proficiency tended to have a stronger positive attitude or greater satisfaction towards the quality of the reading materials in terms of content and physical aspects.