35 very poor, and their intelligence to catch my explanations are very slow.
Meanwhile , it‘s totally different with students in the afternoon class. They have
good basic knowledge in English and it is easy to teach them because they can understand my explanations easily.
The same experience also happens when the researcher teaches in a non- state school. The differences between bilingual class and regular class are so big.
The students who study in bilingual class are those who come from wealthy family. They are usually successful in most of the subjects at school. On the other
hand, the students who study in regular class mostly fail in learning English. Their hand-books are also different from the bilingual class; in regular class they
still use books from the government, while in bilingual class they use Cambridge books.
From this point of view, it makes the researcher very interested in doing a research of lived experiences in learning English to learners of low financial
capacity. Since the researcher is studying in Yogyakarta, the researcher would like to know how the low financial capacity learners in Yogyakarta learn English.
In addition, it will enrich my knowledge and experiences as a teacher to understand and have empathic understanding to those kinds of learners.
3. The Nature of Lived Experience
The researcher feels necessary and important to share her understanding on lived experience because phenomenological human inquiry begins in lived
experience and eventually turns back to it. Dilthey in van Manen 1990 has suggested that in its most basic form, lived experience involves our immediate
pre-reflective consciousness of life. It means that lived experience is not based
36 on something that directly happens to the researcher, in this term. The researcher
can assume that the presence of consciousness and reflective activity in lived experiences makes the lived experience different with experience. By possesing
reflexive awareness, the researcher can consciously reflect the phenomenon that happen in the surrounding by observing and concerning to it as a matter that can
be extracted and combined with her own experience and knowledges. According to van Manen 1990 lived experience is the starting point and
end point of phenomenological research. The aim of phenomenology is to transform lived experience into a textual expression of its essence in such a way
that the effect of the text is at once a reflexive re-living and a reflective appropriation of something meaningful: a notion by which a reader is powerfully
animated in his or her own lived experience. Furthermore, Dilthey in van Manen 1985 suggested that
―lived experience is to the soul what breath is to the body: Just as our body needs to
breathe; our soul requires the fulfillment and expansion of its existence in the reverbera
tions of emotional life‖. van Manen 1990 stated that lived experience is the breathing of meaning as reflected in the following statement.
In the flow of life, consciousness breathes meaning into and from movement: a constant heaving between the inner and the outer made
concrete, for example, in my reflexive consciousness of hope for a child and the child as the object of hope. Thus, a lived experience
has a certain essence, a ―quality‖ that we recognize in retrospect.
Additionally, Gadamer 1975 observed that the word ‗experience‘ has a
condensing and intensifying meaning: ―If something is called or considered an experience its meaning rounds it into the unity of a significant whole‖.
37 The essence concluded from Dilthey in van Manen 1990, Gadamer
1975, and van Manen 1990 is that lived experience becomes a main element that provides evidences or data for phenomenological research. In line with that,
one‘s experiences may be related to others‘ lived experiences in a defined system to be reflected as information or data for the research. In simpler words, the
presence of lived experiences is considered as a must in phenomenological research.
4. Research Participants
