49 cluster-sampling strategy, the population is divided into clusters and the members
of each cluster must be homogeneous. Each cluster is randomly selected from the total population. Neuman 2007 adds that in the cluster sampling a cluster is
considered as a unit in which there is the sampling elements nevertheless, the sampling element can be treated as a sampling itself.
The population of this study is students of English Letters Department of Sanata Dharma University. This study program requires its students to complete
the study in four years or eight semesters. In this cross-sectional study, the writer decided to select three groups of students from the second, the fourth and the sixth
semester students to take a representative sample from three different language proficiencies. The second, the fourth and the sixth semester students represent the
freshman, sophomore and the junior students respectively. The sample consists of three clusters or groups of students: the second semester, fourth semester and the
sixth semester students of English Letters Department of Sanata Dharma University. Each group was represented by a group of students consisted of 30
students. Therefore, there were total 90 students as the samples of this study.
D. DATA GATHERING TECHNIQUES AND INSTRUMENTS
To obtain required data that will be analyzed in this study, the researcher needed to use instruments or tools. There are many types of data gathering
instruments that can be utilized to obtain data. Cohen et al. 2000 recommend nine types of data gathering instrument to obtain data for research in education:
interview, questionnaire, observation, test, accounts, biographies, and case studies, role playing, stimulations and personal construct. In determining the most
appropriate research instrument, one should consider about what kind of research
50 to conduct i.e. a survey, an experiment, an in-depth ethnography, action research,
case study research or testing and assessment. To obtain data that later can be analyzed and be interpreted to
accommodate the writer to the answer the research questions, this cross-sectional study uses a written test as a the data gathering instrument. According to Cohen et
al. 2000 a test could provide information relevant to key term of survey research that covers: measuring, testing, representativeness and generalizability. Moreover,
one of the research foci is score that could be obtained when test is implemented. Therefore, this study uses a test as a data-gathering instrument.
The test items were divided into two categories: replacing the given verb into a correct verb form and multiple choices. The test for research respondent
that aimed as the data-gathering instrument is presented in Appendix 1 while constructs of the test items is presented in Appendix 2. The first kind of the test
item was utilized to measure learners’ acquisition on the grammatical aspects usage. Allocated time for learners to do this test was 30 minutes. On this test, the
learners were asked to transform the given verb in every sentence into the most appropriate verb form suitable for the grammatical aspects represented in the
sentence. The second test item type was multiple choices; the instruction was the learners were asked to choose a correct grammatical aspect of each sentence.
There were four choices available in each number of test items: simple, perfect, progressive, and perfect progressive.
E. DATA ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE
In order to be able to develop comprehensive information from the obtained data set, it is necessary to analyze the dataset. In this study, the data was
51 processed using descriptive statistic technique. It was selected with some
considerations, the first consideration was that this study needed an analysis technique that could analyze and describe information from scores obtained from
the test. Hence, according to Sprinthall, Schmutte, Sirois 1991 “descriptive statistic technique is used for literally describing the characteristics of a given set
or sets of score”. The second consideration was this study required a statistical analysis
technique which able to analyze the significance of the development of the acquisition of the grammatical aspects of the three groups of students. Hence the
analysis technique must be able to measure each sampling group characteristic in order to be able to draw a conclusion regarding the developmental pattern of those
three sample groups. In addition, according to Sprinthall, Schmutte, Sirois 1991, descriptive statistics aimed at providing the measurement for several
things such as central tendency, variability, relationships, skewness, group characteristics, kurtosis, as well as scores. This technique uses graphs and tables
in order provide more elaborate information particularly regarding the various measures of group characteristics. Therefore, descriptive analysis technique is
suitable to be applied in this study. Furthermore, to accommodate the needs of information to answer first
research question about the developmental pattern as well as third research question about problematic grammatical aspects there was another data analysis
technique employed, i.e. inferential statistic specifically the nonparametric analysis technique. A non-parametric test was selected because the obtained data
were not normally distributed. In addition, the number of the data sample is only
