28 ability. They have obtained many theories of speaking and they have been given
enough practice to speak. There were four classes of Sociolinguistic in the 20112012 academic year
and there were about thirty five students in each class. There were seven groups of presentation in every class consisting of five to six persons. The researcher
recorded the presentations of Sociolinguistic classes in class C and class D and simply chose three persons from those two classes to be interviewed. Every
student in both classes has the same possibility of being chosen and they were considered as equal.
This research was conducted to find out problems which were encountered by the sixth semester students’ in placing verb stress during their presentations.
To answer the first research question, the researcher analyzed the recordings of the fourteen groups. Then, the researcher conducted an interview involving six
participants to answer the second research question.
D. Instruments and Data Gathering Technique
In order to acquire the data to answer the research questions, the researcher used four instruments, namely human instrument, documents, and
interview protocol.
1. Human Instrument
An instrument is a tool or a device which is used to obtain the data. In this research, the researcher was the instrument of the research which was called
human instrument. The research could not be conducted without human
29 instrument because it was the key instrument of the research. According to
Poggenpoel and Myburgh 2003, the key in obtaining the data in a qualitative research is the researcher. Moreover, the researcher becomes the facilitator of the
researcher. He or she facilitates the communication in order to gather rich data. In this research, the researcher did not only obtain the data, but also analyzed the
data. By using interview protocol, the researcher interviewed the participants in order to obtain supporting data. Besides, the researcher was also the one who
constructed the interview protocol and made the transcripts of the recordings of the students. Hence, human instrument was very important and the researcher, as
human instrument, was the data collector to answer the first and the second research questions.
2. Documents
The first instruments used by the researcher were documents. In this research, the documents were the recordings of the students’ presentations. The
recordings were used to make a list of verbs and to decide whether they had produced correct verb stresses or not. By listening to the recordings, the
researcher could know which syllables were stressed and which were not. Meanwhile, the researcher also used documents to answer the second research
question. The documents were the transcripts of the interview results.
3. Interview Protocol
The researcher used an interview protocol to obtain more data in order to answer the second research question. The interview was conducted in the end of
30 June involving six participants. There were three points of data which were gained
from the interview, the first was the importance of word stress, especially verb stress, the second was the experiences in dealing with the practice of placing verb
stress, and the third was the efforts which were made to minimize the problems. The interview was in the form of open interview. It was chosen because open
interview gives the participants chance to answer the questions freely.
E. Data Analysis Technique
