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CHAPTER III
METHOD OF INVESTIGATION
The data were taken from the participants‟ realization strategies of requests in
certain situations consisting of seven different situations in which each situation was supposed to have different social distance, degree of imposition, gender, and
power in the form of written elicitation. The elicitation prompts were given in Bahasa Indonesia in the purpose of avoiding misunderstanding. The data analysis
was done qualitatively by means of describing the requests using request strategies proposed by Blum- Kulka et al 1989.
3.1 Approach of the Study
The analysis approach is in the sense that utterances produced by participants of the study are described qualitatively. It concerned with the speech act practice
especially request. Aquino 2006: 61 states that research which ascertains prevailing conditions in a group or case under study is descriptive one. Qualitative
research presents the data and result in comprehensive description instead of presenting it statistically.
3.2 Participant of the Study
The participants of the study were the English Department of Semarang State University UNNES students on senior year who have learnt English for about
ten years on formal education.
3.3 Types of the Data
The data of the study were the participants‟ utterances based on the prompted
request of different situations; in which they were expected to produce different realization based on their social constraint related to the setting. Pursuing the
validity of the data, I chose not to give the situations in the English but in Indonesian with the consideration that English situation raises the possibility of
confusions andor misunderstanding which were risky.
3.4 Unit of Analysis
The analysis was conducted based on the participants‟ utterances in responding
the situations . The participants‟ responses can be found in appendix 4 which were
rewritten as they were without any corrections.
3.5 Data Collection
The participants were given a written instruction to respond request in seven socially differentiated situations. That was intended to assess their awareness of
the distinctive strategies they had to choose which indicate their sociolinguistics competence. The elicitation prompts were intentionally written in Indonesian with
the purpose of avoiding any lexicogrammatical hints for instance vocabulary and spelling. Their responses were in the written elicitation form.
3.6 Data Analysis
