Research Method Research Participants

CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents the methodology employed in the study. This includes the descriptions of the research method, the research participants, the nature and source of data, the research instruments, the data gathering technique, and the data analysis technique.

A. Research Method

Basically, this study was a qualitative research. Qualitative research focused on understanding social phenomena from the perspective of the human participants in the study Ary, Jacobs and Razavieh, 2002: 22. Moreover, qualitative problems looked at the context of events, natural setting, subjects’ perspectives, unfolding and uncontrolled events, reasons for the events, and phenomena needing exploration and explanation Ary et al., 2002: 426. Also, this kind of research did not use statistical analysis. The methods being used were content analysis, and library research. The researcher used content analysis since the data were gathered by recording the participants’ speeches. Content analysis was a technique for examining the content, or information and symbols, contained in written documents or other communication medium Neuman, 2006: 44. The documents could be books, newspaper or magazine articles, advertisements, speeches, official documents, films or videotapes, musical lyrics, photographs or pictures, articles of clothing, 34 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI gestures, or works of art. Content analysis was often used in conjunction with observational studies. The researcher tape recorded classroom verbal behavior and made a typed transcript from the audiotape. The content of the transcript was then analyzed in order to measure variables formulated by the researcher Borg and Gall, 1983: 512. Moreover, the researcher also used library research. In library research, the researcher referred to the theory on sources of nouns stress placement to find the data and to draw conclusion.

B. Research Participants

The participants of this study were twenty two students of the second semester of the English Language Education Study Program of Sanata Dharma University who were taking Interactional Speech II Class in the academic year of 20072008. The students of Interactional Speech II were chosen since they were in the stage of learning English as means of communication. In Interactional Speech II Class, the students were expected to speak up and express their ideas. It is expected that by analyzing the students of Interactional Speech II, the writer could obtain the pure data about students’ mastery of stress placement of nouns. The total number of the second semester students of English Language Education Sanata Dharma University in the academic year of 20072008 was about 160 people. This number of students was divided into six classes of Interactional Speech II. Since it would not be possible for the writer to involve the entire classes of the population of the students, the writer chosen the most PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI representative class which presented the characteristics of the participants. Finally, the writer chose Class E as the representative since that class applied an individual and impromptu test which then allowed the writer to obtain natural behavior of the participants as the data to be analyzed. There were 22 participants, 18 female and 4 male. The data were obtained while the participants did their final test of Interactional Speech II on Friday, 23 May 2008. The writer observed the participants and recorded their speeches.

C. The Nature and Source of Data