44
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
This chapter discusses the methodology used in this research. It covers the discussion about the nature of the data, the research design, and the data analysis.
A. NATURE OF DATA
This research used corpus as the only data. According to Bennett 2010: 2, “a corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring examples of language
stored electronically”. It serves to identity particular patterns related to lexical or grammatical features and how they differ within varieties and registers. Spesifically, a
corpus can be used to find information about frequency. It provides frequency data which later may change what is taught in teaching activities McEnery and Xiao,
2011. In this research, the corpus was in written form. There was no data gathering
instrument since the corpus had already been ready to download from the Internet. It was a junior high school student’s textbook published by the Ministry of Education
and Culture to support the implementation of Curriculum 2013. The textbook was entitled When English Rings the Bell with Asep Gunawan, Yuli Rulani Khatimah, and
Siti Wachidah as the text contributors. It was a 188-page textbook with eight chapters, published in 2013.
Picture 3.1 Cover of When English Rings the Bell
The textbook was chosen with regard to the implementation of Curriculum 2013. It is a new textbook specially designed for the new curriculum. Since the textbook is still
new, many teachers might not have investigated further what is presented in the textbook, especially the vocabulary items. This textbook was chosen to help teachers
know the vocabulary level and coverage of the textbook and later help them make decisions on how to use the textbook based on students’ needs.
B. RESEARCH DESIGN
This was a corpus-based research. Corpus-based research “involves the analysis of large corpora of authentic running text by means of computer software”
Kruger, 2002: 70. According to Bennett 2010, the use of authentic languge is the key characteristics of corpus approach. The corpora could be composed of telephone
conversations, world literature, newspapers, textbooks, or any other real-life situations which provided authentic language.
Biber, Conrad, and Reppen 1998 propose that there are four major characteristics of corpus research. “It is empirical, analyzing the actual patterns of use
in natural texts; utilizes a large and principled collection of natural texts, known as a corpus as the basis for analysis; makes extensive use of computers for analysis, using
both automatic and interactive techniques; and depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques”. The pattern which was analyzed in this research
was frequency in a textbook which provided natural texts. As the basis for analysis, some word lists were used, which were General Service List of English Words 1
GSL_1, General Service of English Words 2 GSL_2, and Academic Word List AWL in forms of corpus. The GSLs were used because they provided a corpus
which was based on frequency count, in line with this research. The analysis counting was done by computer softwares named RANGE and FREQUENCY.
Based on the result of the counting, further interpretation was made. In this research, the corpora were obtained from a junior high school
student’s textbook and the computer softwares were RANGE and FREQUENCY
Heatley, Nation, Coxhead, n.d.. The result of the analysis from the software was then interpreted. Some other research on vocabulary in a textbook which used
RANGE were those conducted by Alberding 2006, Hsu 2009, and Matsuoka and Hirsh 2010, which had been discussed in chapter I.
According to McEnery and Xiao 2011: 365, one advantage of corpus-based approach is “the frequency information and quantification of collocation that a corpus
can readily provide”. This advantage helped this research in counting the number of type, token, word family, and word frequency in the corpus and analyzing them.
C. DATA ANALYSIS
Kategori