An Analysis of Character Education Contents in Picture Storybooks for Young Learners of English

Abstract

Students’ moral decadence often happens in Indonesian education. Some ways are implemented to decrease and prevent this matter, including the implementation of character education at an early age. The term character education has been a popular issue since many years ago in schools. The use of literature becomes one of the ways to inculcate character education into school curriculum. Picture storybooks are one of literary works that can be used to build young learners’ good character. This study is motivated by a research problem about character education contents in English picture storybooks for young learners at immersion school in Salatiga. This research was conducted as a qualitative research method using 12 English picture storybooks as the object of the study. Rubric is used to gather data from the selected picture storybooks. The result of the study shows that English picture storybooks can be used for character education. There are three parts discussed. First, the researcher concentrates on explaining about the use of characters in picture storybooks as children’s role models. In the next section, morality in picture storybooks that used to inculcate value is explained. Then, the finding about correlation between value in picture storybooks and standard value in the school curriculum is explained in the last part.