In the second meeting the students were taught about simple past tense by using curriculum vitae cv. The teacher gave some examples of curriculum vitae
to the students, and asked them to explain the background of knowledge of each cv in groups and answered several questions given by the teacher.
The third meeting had the same material with the previous meeting which discussed about background of education, since the time allotment was not
enough to finish the material in the second meeting. In this meeting the students were asked to write their own education background and what they would do after
graduating from school. After that they read their own writing in front of the class and shared it with their friends.
In the fourth meeting, the teacher gave a news article from an online website to the students and asked them to read the text. After that the teacher gave
them several questions according to the article. The next meeting the teacher gave them an example of personal letter to the students, after reading the letter, the
students were asked to reply the letter by describing their own personal experience. In the last meeting, the students of experimental and control class
were given a post-test to check whether they had an improvement in mastering the simple past tense.
The teaching and learning processes described above were conducted in the experimental class. While the controlled class was taught by conventional
method.
D. Population and Sample of the Research
The population of this research were the students in the second grade at SMK Bintang Nusantara, Tangerang Selatan. There are three classes, namely, XI
Akuntansi AK, XI Multimedia MM and XI Teknik Komputer dan Jaringan TKJ, which consist of 62 students of all classes.
The writer uses purposeful sampling to take the sample in this research. Purposeful sampling is a kind of sampling in which sample is selected by the
researcher which heshe believes that the sample can be the representatives of the population.
2
Since this research is quasi-experimental, it used purposive sampling, without random assignment of participants to groups. There are three classes as
the population in this research, but the writer chose only two classes. Those are XI AK and XI MM. The writer chose this class because the number of the students in
both classes is not too different. XI AK class consists of 21 students, and XI MM class consists of 26 students. Meanwhile, XI TKJ class consists only 15 students
which would not be equal to other class if it was taken as a sample of this research. Therefore, the writer decided XI AK and XI MM class as the sample of
this study, after administered the pre-test. The pre-test was firstly given to both classes, in order to compare the
background characteristic of the two classes in their understanding towards the simple past tense. The result of the pre-test showed that both classes had different
score in average, in which XI AK was 60.15, meanwhile XI MM was 43.90. The writer decided to took XI MM as the experimental class, while XI AK as the
controlled class, because the writer wanted to know if there is a significant development of XI MM class in their achivement in English Subject, especially in
the simple past tense after given the treatment which would be compared to XI AK class which has better background of knowledge in the simple past tense.
However, in the end of the research, the writer only got 20 students from each class because some students were absent.
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2
Jack R. Fraenkel Norman E. Wallen, How to Design and Evaluate Research in Education, New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1993, p. 88.
