14 How do they perceive certain conditions for successful group work?
2. The Aim of the Present Study
The current study intended to identify senior high school students‟ perceptions
toward the advantages and disadvantages of group work applied in their English classroom, as well as to find out kinds of conditions influencing the way they perceived
group work as either successful or not.
3. Participants
At Satya Wacana Christian Senior High School, Salatiga, Indonesia, 120 twelfth graders around 15-19 years old became the respondents of this study. The twelfth graders
were chosen since plausibly they had more experience in working in groups rather than both the eleventh and tenth graders due to the longer time they devoted to study at school.
Therefore, it was hoped that the twelfth graders were able to make meaning of the group work experience that they had, much better than other lower-grade students in the school.
4. Instrumentation
A set of questions in the form of a questionnaire was administered to 120 twelfth graders for this study. The respondents were required to give their perceptions by
responding to 22 questions. These questions were written in Indonesian instead of English to help the respondents to better understand the meaning of each statement, with
the hope that the responses given were even more reliable.
15 The first part of the questionnaire presented a short introduction, covering my
identity, the purpose of the study, and also a promise to keep the respondents‟ identity as confidential. Still in this part, 21 close-ended items in the form of a Likert scale and 1
regular close-ended item were presented. These items were implicitly categorized under 4 themes, namely social, academic, and fairness aspects, as well as conditions for
successful group work. This categorization was done to assist me to obtain more organized data to be analyzed later on.
The second part asked for the demographical information of the students, including their age, gender, length of studying English, as well as length of experiencing
group work learning strategy in the school. Furthermore, the last part questioned about the optional inf
ormation on the respondents‟ name and phone number. This information could be later used as a way to have some personal communications with some
respondents if there were parts needed to figure out more. As discussed earlier, a Likert scale was used. As Likert 1932 points out, to use a
Likert scale, the researcher has to present a set of statements along with the space for the respondents‟ judgments, ranging from extremely positive to negative ones. Following this
model, I designed a series of statements related to the advantages and disadvantages of group work derived from the previous studies and some informal conversations with
several twelfth graders. In each statement, I provided spaces for each statement in the form of a table to ease the respondents to respond, regarding to what extent they agreed
or disagreed with each written statement.
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