The Results of the Questionnaire

The next two statements of the questionnaire are correlated. They aimed to find out whether or not two weeks of practicing using Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context were sufficient for the students to be able to use it on their own, without having a look at the steps, and whether or not they were able to do so without following the exact steps of the procedure. Statement number three was meant to confirm the students ’ responses to the second statement. However, the researcher finds their ’ responses to these two correlated statements contradicting each other. As many as seven students 60 out of a total of 10 of them agreed with statement number two. The rest of them 40 disagreed with the statement. This figure is divided into two. 30 disagreed and 10 of them strongly disagreed with the statement. The level of agreement of the statement is as high as 60. The students ’ responses to the next statement are as follows: 10 strongly agreed, 50 agreed, and the other 40 disagreed with the statement. The level of agreement of the statement, therefore, is only as high as 60. This figure is precisely the same as the figure which represents the level of agreement on the previous statement. Statement number three was originally designed to help the researcher find out the percentage of all the students who would admit to have been able to use the procedure after two weeks of exposure who could apply the procedure without following the exact steps described by Nation. As far as the researcher is concerned, it is only logical that one could not possibly use the procedure without following the exact steps while one has not been fully capable of using the procedure. Later, the researcher found out that there were two participants who might have misunderstood the statements. Participant number three disagreed with the second statement, but strongly disagreed with the third statement. Additionally, participant number ten strongly disagreed with the second statement, but disagreed with the third statement. Nevertheless, the responses to these two statements of the questionnaire do confirm the students ’ scores of the posttest, which has been proved by the t test to not be significantly higher than those of the pretest because not all of them had completely understood how the guessing procedure should have been used. Apparently, this resulted from the lack of time given by the researcher for them to comprehend the procedure, as suggested by the questionnaire result of statement number two, where only 60 of the questionnaire participants agreed that two weeks of practice using the procedure had been enough for them to be able to use it. The forth questionnaire statement aimed to find out whether or not Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing for context helped the participants figure out the meanings of the words they had just met. Their responses to this statement were highly positive. 70 of them agreed that the procedure helped them and the rest of them 30 strongly agree with the statement. This means that the agreement level of this questionnaire item reaches 100. The last item of the first part of the questionnaire intended to discover if the guessing from context procedure helped the research participants retain the words whose meanings they had figured out using the procedure in a relatively long period of time. As many as three participants 27.27 strongly agreed that this was the case. Another five 44.45 of the participants agreed with the statement, while the other three 27.27 disagreed. The agreement level of the questionnaire item is 72.73, which is quite high. After elaborating the findings of the research from the closed-ended part of the questionnaire, the researcher now shifts his focus to the findings from the open-ended one. There were five questions in this part of the questionnaire. These five questions were designed elicit responses from the participants with regard to their experience practicing using Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context for two weeks, such as the advantages and the drawbacks of the procedure, their difficulties while using the procedure, the most difficult step of the procedure, an d the clue that helped them the most in figuring out a word’s meaning using the procedure. The first question of the second part of the questionnaire was about the advantages of Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context experienced by the research participants. The researcher presents the findings in Table 4.3. Table 4.3 The Advantages of Using Clarke and Nation’s Guessing from Context Procedure according to the Participants Number Advantages of the Guessing from Context Procedure Based on the Questionnaire Results 1. “The procedure was easy to remember and understand.” 2. a “The procedure paid attention to the parts of speech.” b “It reduced the use of the dictionary.” 3. “I could figure out the meaning of a word step by step.” 4. “We could know the meaning of an unknown word without using the dictionary.” 5. “I had to analyze the meanings of the words, so I could remember the words better.” 6. a “It did not depend on the use of the dictionary.” b “I could understand the sentences faster.” 7. “I could tell the parts of speech of the words.” . a “It was easy to remember.” b “It did not require the use of the dictionary.” 9. “I could understand a word without consulting the dictionary, so it was faster than using the dictionary.” 10. “The procedure made it easier for me to understand those words.” The next open-ended question was designed by the researcher in an attempt to discover the drawbacks of Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context from the point of view of the participants who had already learned using the procedure for two weeks. A large number of the participants admitted that the procedure was not practical and complicated. The participants’ responses to this question are listed in Table 4.4. Table 4.4 The Disadvantag es of Using Clarke and Nation’s Guessing from Context Procedure according to the Participants Participant Number Disadvantages of the Guessing from Context Procedure Based on the Questionnaire Results 1. “Not practical.” 2. “Not practical.” 3. “Complicated.” 4. “Not practical.” 5. “Nothing.” 6. a “Not practical.” b “One must be able to identify a word’s part of speech well.” 7. “Nothing.” 8. “Difficult and not practical.” 9. “Sometimes the answers did not match with the dictionary.” 10. “It was hard to understand the context when the context was too short.” As seen in Table 4.4, as many as six out of a total of 10 participants conceded that the guessing from procedure was not practical. The researcher’s early assumption is that this is due to the fact the procedure was new to the research subjects and has five steps to it. Being unfamiliar with the procedure, it took a long time for the research subjects to figure out what a word meant using the procedure. Through the next question in the open-ended section of the questionnaire, the researcher attempted to elicit the participants’ opinions on the difficulties they experienced for two weeks during which they were exposed to the experimentation and learned how to use the guessing from context procedure. In order to make the participants respond to the question as specifically as possible, the researcher gave them three choices, which were 1 limited time, 2 incomprehensible explanation from the researcher who also taught them how to use the procedure, and 3 other specific difficulties. Out of a total of ten participants, only three of them 30 used the options provided by the researcher. Two of them conceded that the difficulties they faced when learning to use the procedure was the limited time. The other participant said it was the researcher’s incomprehensible explanation on the procedure which became his difficulty in learning the procedure. The rest of the participants 70 opted to not use the options and specify their own responses instead. Participant number three and nine stated that their difficulty lay in determining a word’s synonym. In Clarke and Nation’s guessing procedure, this is the last step of the procedure. Another three of them said that their difficulty was in identifying a w ord’s part of speech. Participant number six’s answer was slightly different from the aforementioned responses. She stated that the procedure’s many steps were her main difficulty when learning how to use the procedure properly.

3. The Student

s’ Mistakes in Using Clarke and Nation’s Procedure for Guessing from Context in the Posttest In this part of the chapter, the researcher presents and analyzes the mistakes the participants made in the process of guessing word meanings using Clarke and Nation’s procedure which occurred the most. This part aims to answer the third research questions. The data for this discussion were obtained from the students’ performance in the posttest. The researcher classifies their’ mistakes by the steps of Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context. Table 4.5 classifies the participants’ mistakes in using Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context. However, the classification is restricted only to the fourth step of Clarke and Nation’ procedure as the researcher did not instruct the participants to do the fifth step of the procedure, checking, which involves the use of the dictionary. Table 4.5 The Students’ Mistakes Found within Their Posttest Work Participant Number Mistakes Found Step 1: Determining the unknown word’s part of speech Step 2: Restructuring the sentence into one easier to understand Step 3: Taking into consideration the clues found in the context Step 4: Guessing the meaning of the unknown word 1. 10 6 2. 7 3 3. 2 6 1 5 4 1 7 3 4 5. 5 5 4 6. 9 4 7. 10 5 3 8. 6 6 9. 1 3 10. 4 10 3 7 11. 9 1 4 12. 2 2 2 13. 2 4 4 14. 3 3 2 15. 5 5 8 Total mistakes found 8 91 32 65 Looking at Table 4.5, it is obvious that the second step of Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context proved the most difficult stage for the research subjects for as many as 91 mistakes were found in this step. This number represents 46.43 of all the mistakes found in the research subjects’ posttest results. At this step, the participants were expected to restructure the sentences in order for them to easily understand the sentences if the sentences were either too long or complicated to understand. In Teaching and Learning Vocabulary, Nation 1990 gives an example of how the second step of the procedure should be done. The following is the context in which the word “bestowed” is found. [Chinese spectacles] were regarded as objects of reverence because the rims of tortoise-shell cane from a sacred and symbolic animal, and the lenses were made from sacred stones. People wore them at first not so much to aid eyesight, or for curing eye-ailments, as for good luck, or for the dignity which they bestowed on the wearer. Sometimes even empty frames were worn as a mark of distinction p. 163. In the next page, Nation sets an example of how learners can guess the meaning of the word step by step and at the second step he restructures the sentence in which the word “bestowed” is found into “Spectacles bestow dignity on the wearer” p. 164. The posttest items, as well as the practice items, were taken from the official websites of a number of newspapers, such as The Jakarta Post and BBC. In order to make it easier for the research subjects to understand the contexts, the researcher only included a maximum of two sentences for each practice and