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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This chapter presents the methodology applied in conducting the study. It provides an explanation on how the study is planned and conducted in order to
answer the research question related to teacher talk in Elementary school English class.
A. Research Plan 1. Research Method
Since this research aims to answer “What are the functions of teacher talk
in Elementary School English class? ” The researcher adopted descriptive
qualitative research as a research method. In this qualitative research, the researcher identifyed a topic to obtain in depth analysis within natural context.
Allwright and Baily 1991 state that naturalistic inquiry is adopted when researcher wants to investigate what is realy going on in foreign language
classroom. “Naturalistic Inquiry” refers to that researcher tries not to intervene in the research setting and does not try to control naturally occuring events, because
the study wishes to describe and understand the process of teaching-learning and the performance of the teacher in the classroom. Hence, the researcher typically
observes, interviews and analyzes the data obtained from the research field.
2. Nature of Data
In order to support the completeness of the data and to answer the research problem, this study used two instruments to get the data. The data were collected
from the observation during the process of teaching-learning English. The form of
39 data were audio-visual recordings concerning teacher talk taken during classroom
observation. The classroom observation data serve as the main data in this study. Meanwhile, the interview result used to support the class observation data
analyzis.
3. Data Sources a. Research Participants
The participants of this study were two elementary school English teachers in SDN 010 Tanjung Selor, East Kalimantan. There were several differences
between the two participants related with their gender, age, experience, and education background. These were to make sense of the richness of the data
source. Since this research was aimed to find out and describe the function of the languages used by the teacher in Elementary school English class, the data source
was limited from these two participants. There were several reason why the researcher decided them as the teacher participants. Firstly, the researcher has a
good relationship with the two participants because they were teaching at the same school where the researcher worked as a teacher before. So the researcher
knows them closely. Secondly, they have their discipline in doing their best as a teacher in this school.
The first participant teacher A was a 45 years old male. He has been teaching English in elementary school for about eight years. Despite, he is not
from an English education department background, he has a lot of experiences in teaching English at Elementary school during the last eight years. His formal
education background was from Elementary school teacher education program or Pendidikan Guru Sekolah Dasar PGSD. However, he has attended a lot of
40 English courses to improve and develop his English knowledge and ability to
enable him to teach the students in this school effectively. Then, the second participant teacher B was a 27 years old famale. She
has just finished her study from an English education department at UIN Islamic State University Makassar in 2010. Then, she started teaching English in the
early 2011. She has been teaching English for the last two years. She has a high dedication in doing her job as a teacher. She teaches English in this school at
grade four and grade five. Besides, she has also attended alot of English courses to improve her English knowledge and proficiency.
b. Research Setting
This study was conducted in SDN 010 Tanjung Selor, East Kalimantan. This is one of several state or government schools located in the capital city of
Bulungan regency Kabupaten Bulungan East Kalimantan. The study was started in the second semester of 20122013 academic year. It was done during
January 2013. This school consists of grade one to grade six and divided into 20 classes
i.e. 3 classes of grade one, 4 classes of grade two, 3 classes of grade three, 4 classes of grade four, 3 classes of grade five, and 3 classes of grade six. There are
about 28 to 30 students in each class. Totally, this school has 614 students, 28 teachers, and 4 employees in it. Since, this school has only thirteen classrooms,
the duration for the class is divided into two sections. Grade one and grade two start from 07.30am to 10.15am, grade three and four start from 10.30am to
01.30pm, and grade five and six start from 07.30am to 12.05pm. In this school English was taught as a local content or muatan lokal. Students in each grades get
41 the English lesson once a week with 2 x 35 minutes allocation for each meeting.
In the 20122013 academic year when the researcher conducted the research in this school, English was taught from grade four to six.
There were several reasons for the researcher to conduct this research in this school. The first one is because this Elementary school is located in the same
town where the researcher lives. This supports the research in term of time management in conducting this study. The second reason is in term of
accessibility. The researcher has no problem when the researcher conducted this study in this school, because this school is as the school where the researcher
taught before. Hopefully, the reseach findings contribute to the development of English teaching and learning quality to this school in the future.
4. Research Instruments
This study made use of two instruments in collecting the data. They were a video-camcorder and interview guideline. Video-camcoder was used to take the
class observation data while the interview guideline was used in interviewing the participants to obtain the reasons and opinions from the participants about the
utterances used in the classroom. Since this study focused on the teacher talk therefore the researcher focused the observation on how the teacher participants
used their verbal language in teaching-learning process. However, observation is mostly applicable in qualitative research methods Cohen, 2005. In the
observation, the researcher was not directly involved in the classroom activities. To reflect what actually happens in the classroom, the whole process of teaching-
learning in the classroom was audio-visual recorded.
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5. Data Collection Technique
There are several data collections in a qualitative research, such as observations, interviews, documents, and audiovisual materials, Cresswell, 2007:
75. In order to get the description of the phenomenon in this research site, the researcher used two data collections method in collecting the data. They were
observation and interview.
a. Observation
This qualitative study used observation as a technique in gathering the qualitative data about the teacher talk in the classroom. Therefore, the researcher
did some class observations to get the data in the form of audio-visual. Cresswell 2007: 129 states that audio-visual material is one type of data in qualitative
research. This study focuses to find out and describe the functions of the teacher talk in Elementary school English class. The observation was focused on the
utterances used by the teacher. There were two sessions of lesson in which each participant at different classess was observed. Each session lasted for 70 minutes.
All of the participants’ teaching practices were recorded in audio-visual. Thus, there are four audio-visual recordings collected from the class observation. In the
observation process, the researcher was not directly involved in the teaching- learning processes. The researcher only watched and recorded
the teacher’s performance especialy the teacher talk, in order to get the real situation in the
process of teaching-learning. Accordingly, Alwasilah 2003 states that the technique of observation is important because it is possible to describe what goes
on, how things happen and why things happen in particular situation. Data gathering started in the first two weeks on January 2013.
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b. Interview
Interviews is one type of data collection in a qualitative research Cresswell, 2007: 75. In this study, interview was used as a thecnique in
investigating information from the participants about their understanding and purpose of using certain utterances during the process of teaching and learning.
Therefore, the questions used in the interview were constructed based on the result of class observation data analysis. The questions were open-response ones.
The interview yield direct quotation from people about their experiences, opinions, feelings, and knowledge Patton, 2002: 4. The interview in this study
also serves as an important tool for the researcher to ensure the accuracy of the analysis of class observation data gained.
6. Data Analysis
Since the focus of this study is on the language used by the teacher, therefore, this study tried to find out and describe the functions of teacher talk in
Elementary school English class. The observation was conducted for the participants in their teaching practices. The audio-visual data were taken from the
class observation. The data were transcribed for the analysis. The transcription focuses on the teacher talk. The first stage was categorizing the the teacher talk in
classroom. Then, the next step was analyzing the functions of the teacher talk. The way to analyze it was by identifying the categories of the teacher talk present in
the talk cycles. The 20 functions of teacher talk in two categories were coded based on FLINT analysis system. All of them are shown in the following table
table 3.1
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Table 3.1 Teacher Talk Categories and Coding Brown 2007: 217
Teacher Talk Indirect Influence
Direct Influence Functions
Coding Functions
Coding
1 accepting Acpt.
1 giving information Giv.Inf
2 discussing Disc.
2 correcting Corrt.
3 praising Pra.
3 requestcommands Req.
4 encouraging En.
4 giving direction Giv. Dirc
5 confirming Con.
5 directing drill Dirc. Drl.
6 joking Jok.
6 criticizing Crt.
7 making fun Mak.Fn.
7 rejection Rejc.
8 explaining Exp.
8 translating Trans.Csw.
9 clarifying Cla.
code-switching 10 repeating words
Rep.Wrd. 11 display question
Dis. Qst. 12 referential question Ref. Qst.
The result of class observation data analysis were examined to construct some questions for the interview. The interview was done for all of the
participants. The interview was designed to investigate the reasons and opinions from the participants on using teacher talk in the classrom during the of process
teaching and learning. What the purpose of using that utterances were.
7. Trustworthiness
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