32 Specifically, in the narrower sense, this step could be regarded as text
analysis. Anderson 1997 explains that text analysis has a narrower focus and is restricted to analysis of text features and it is usually related to comprehensibility
or writing style. Furthermore, Anderson 1997 adds that text analysis is also usually used to
match the students with appropriate learning materials to achieve best results in learning. He also explains that one characteristic of appropriate learning materials
in this context is text reading difficulty or readability. To do the preliminary research the writer adapted the steps involved in
conducting document analysis as suggested by Ary et al. 2002 as follows:
a. Specifying the phenomenon to be investigated
In this study, the phenomenon to be investigated was the readability indices of The Jakarta Post articles.
b. Selecting the media from which the observations are to be made
The media for this study was The Jakarta Post. This English newspaper was selected for its availability and its lengthy consistent quality to provide newspaper
in English language in Indonesia since 1983. The number of its subscribers is approximately 40,000 Suryadiningrat, 2009. In this research, the writer did not
take the articles right away from the newspaper, because it would be difficult to copy the article from the paper. Thus, instead of using newspaper and copying
articles one by one, the writer took the articles from The Jakarta Post website http:www.thejakartapost.com. It was also easier to manage and feasible to
conduct computations using soft copies rather than the hard ones.
33
c. Formulating exhaustive and mutually exclusive coding categories
The coding categories are therefore variable involved in Flesch Reading Ease FRE and Flesch Kincaid-Grade Level FKG formula which was used by
the writer. They were average sentence length and average number of syllables per word.
d. Deciding the sampling plan to be used
This step was applied in order to obtain a representative sample of the documents. As Ary et al., 2002 suggests, for newspaper, the samples can be
taken three issues per week. While in this study, the writer used a month articles which was taken in daily basis. The writer took one article per day from The
Jakarta Post newspaper.
Using random sampling then the writer chooses articles in daily basis in the ‘Headlines’ section. The articles collected ranging for a month period, which is in
October 2009. The articles were taken from The Jakarta Post website as it was more practical and easy to administer. The section was chosen because the news
written there were mostly Indonesian news. Hence, students will also be familiar with how to build Indonesian terms, such as party names, government institutions,
and particular terms for certain fields, etc.
e. Training the coders
This step was involved based on the presumption that the coders are human, as Ary has exemplified in his book. However, in this study, the writer computed
the readability levels of the document using FRE and FKG level which is already built-in on Microsoft Word 2007. Thus, there is no need to train decoders, as this
