Character Building in Junior High School English Language Textbooks: A Content Analysis

This study aimed to analyze whether the reading and texts and activities in the textbooks reflect the eighteen character building values. The research design of this study is descriptive-qualitative content analysis. Four steps in collecting data consisted of 1) writing down the topics, reading texts and activities of the units in the textbooks for grade seven and eight; (2) selecting the topics, reading texts and activities in the textbooks; (3 ) analyzing the topics, reading texts and activities in the textbooks by using the table consist of some indicators ; (4) drawing conclusion based on the result of the findings and discussion.This study yielded three findings. First, each unit in the textbooks, actually, has already reflects character building values implicitly. Second, it is found that not all units in the two textbooks provide reading texts so that the writer must modify the existed texts to reflect character building values. Then, the two English textbooks do not cover all of the eighteen values of character building values that reflected from the topics of unit and reading texts. Consequently, the two textbooks published by National Education Department need to be revised.