human instrument. Additionally, the writer used supporting references as the secondary data.
1. Documents
In relation to the first research problem, the instrument was documents. Borg and Gall 1983: 806 classified documents in several ways: handwritten or printed,
published or unpublished, public or private use, and unpremeditated documents, those intended for immediate purpose, or intentional documents, those prepared as
historical records. However, the documents must serve valid sources, such as: records, reports, printed forms, letters, autobiographies, diaries, compositions, themes
or other academic works, books, periodicals, bulletins or catalogues, syllabi, court decisions, pictures, films, and cartoons Best, 1981: 107.
In this research, the documents analyzed were students’ writing assignments. Based on the classifications of documents, the students’ writing assignments were
included in printed, unpublished, private use, unpremeditated documents. The writer chose students’ assignments as data because the prepositional verb errors could be
naturally written in the form of assignments. Thus, it could reflect the actual participants’ mastery of prepositional verbs in their level.
The assignments were the students’ writings of the first final project. The topic was comparison and contrast between extensive reading and intensive reading.
The final project was the result of outlining, drafting, and revision process. The
process took three weeks before the final writing submission. Therefore, the students’ assignments which became the data of this research were considered to be the
students’ best works. They were taken on 30 September 2009.
2. Interview Guide
The writer also used an interview guide as an instrument to solve the second research problem. Interview is an oral questionnaire in which the respondent gives the
needed information verbally in a face-to-face conversation Best, 1981: 164. Interview is beneficial in collecting descriptive data because the interviewees use
their own words so that the interviewer could develop insight into how the interviewees interpret some information Bogdan and Biklen, 2003: 95. In this
research, the writer interviewed three ELESP lecturers who taught Academic Essay Writing class in the academic year 20092010 about their recommendation to
minimize the problem of prepositional verb errors based on their experiences. The purpose of the interview aimed to investigate three points as follows.
1. The importance of prepositional verbs
2. The experience in dealing with the cases of prepositional verb errors
3. The efforts to minimize prepositional verb errors
The writer applied semi-structured interview in order to gather richer interactions and more personalized answers McDonough and McDonough, 2004:
184. The interview was carried out two times. The first one was carried out on 10
November 2009. The second and the third interviews were carried out on 11 November 2009.
3. Human Instrument
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