30 this reason, the researcher tried to obtain the course description from the interview
with Theresia Yunia, S.Pd., M.Hum., the coordinator of English Club. Further, in the interview, the researcher employed a guided interview. It is
an interview using a list of questions or issues that need to be explored in the interview. The list, that became the researcher’s guide, helped the researcher to
make the interview systematic and comprehensive by delimiting in advance some questions and issues needed exploring Patton, 2002.
The researcher’s interview guide could be found in the interview protocol in Appendix 1. Next, to obtain rich
information, the researcher combined the guided interview with open-ended interview. By using open-ended interview, the interviewee was free to give
answers. In other words, the researcher did not limit the answer to specific or particular options or alternatives. In brief, in this research, the researcher combined
two interview approaches namely guided interview and open-ended interview.
2. Observation Checklist
The second instrument used in the research was observation checklist. It was a list of statements that was used by an observer to observe anything that happened
in the learning process. The statements in the observation checklist were generated from the underlying theories of the research, namely the theory of five types of
scaffolding by Roehler and Cantlon 1997 and of the characteristics of scaffolding learning by Bransford, et al. 2000. In addition, the observation checklist consisted
of practical and or technical statements to record students’ activities, involvement, respond, understanding, and other aspects of the learning process.
31 There were two parts in the observation checklist. In the first part, the
researcher tried to obtain the data about the extent to which scaffolding can help students learn writing. In this part, the statements were categorized into five types
of scaffolding as proposed by Roehler and Cantlon 1997. From this part, the researcher was to check how the scaffolding happened to help the students
understand the materials given and thus carry out the project. Meanwhile, in the second part, the eight characteristics of scaffolding learning activities proposed by
Bransford et al. 2000 were transformed into other practical and or technical statements to get the answer of the second research problem, which was the
advantages of using scaffolding in learning writing. In this research, the observation checklist as shown in Appendix 7 was given
to an observer. The observer was to attend every meeting of English Club in every week and observe the researcher who was teaching and any aspect of the learning
process. During the observation, the observer had to check in the available column whenever any statement in the observation checklist emerged in the teaching and
learning process. In addition, the observer was also to add additional notes to record specific events or activities that might be able to strengthen the answer of the
formulated problems. Besides, the involvement of an observer also aimed to avoid bias. In this study, the researcher was both the teacher of the scaffolding learning
process teacher and the researcher. Thus, the presence of the observer was to obtain another perspective in answering the research problems and to avoid subjectivity in
analyzing the data. Besides, it was also difficult to teach and do the observation at
32 the same time. Eventually, the data obtained from the observation checklist was
used to do the data analysis along with other data from other research instruments.
3. Test
