Exploring English Morning Program as a media for practicing students' English Language Skills at Islamic Junior High School

The lack of time for learning English in class makes students feel less effective in improving their English language skills. Therefore, several schools implement English programs to improve English language skills outside the English academic classroom. One of the English programs is the English Morning Program at MTs Bilingual Sidoarjo which is held three times in a week. There are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the morning at 06.30 a.m. before academic class starts. This research aims to explain several activities designed in the English Morning Program and the challenges in implementing the English Morning Program. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method. In collecting data, researcher used observation guidelines and interview guidelines. The researcher observed the activities in each class of five English Morning Program teachers. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with five English Morning Program teachers to strengthen observations and find out the challenges of implementing the English Morning Program. Data analysis was carried out by organizing and preparing the data, reading all data, coding, describing data, presenting narrative paragraphs, and interpreting data. The validity of the research data was checked through data triangulation. The findings show that the English Morning program activities are divided into two locations; inside and outside. Inside the classroom has aspects of opening, core activities, closing, and evaluation. The core activities inside the classroom are the main activities where the teacher provides the process of mastering English by providing learning activities that focus on covering the four skills, including listening, reading, writing, and speaking activities. Meanwhile, outside the classroom only focuses on core activities where the teacher gives direct instructions, such as memorizing some vocabulary or speaking English directly to tourists during English camp, not covering the four English skills. The researcher also found several challenges in implementing the English Morning Program. These challenges include adjusting material according to the four skills of the same topic, management of class time, lack of time and master material assessment, and mechanism of using smart TV. This research provides recommendations for activity designs that can be applied to English programs along with the challenges that arise as information for readers that readers can be more effective to implement English programs in junior high schools.