38 Students who could produce ten or more than ten acceptable units of idea are
considered as above average, while the students who could only provide words not more than ten are considered as below average. The limit of maximum ten is
taken as it is also suggested by Zakaluk and Samuels 1988. How the writer employed this and what cue words used then, will be discussed further in chapter
four. The result of the calculation using formulas determined which articles would be used and what cue words would be written at each line.
b. Cloze Procedure
One of the instruments to answer the research questions was a cloze procedure. The article used for cloze procedure is based on the result of predicting
the readability of ‘Headline’ articles on The Jakarta Post. The writer utilized the most suitable article for first graders of senior high school based on the
computation results of readability formulas. The form of the cloze procedure was the improved one. It was not a
standardized ratio of deletion; rather it was rational deletion version as Binkley 1988 suggested. The improvised cloze procedure, which is the selective
deletions, has proven to have greater instructional effect than random deletions Jongsma, 1980. The details of this type of cloze procedure can be seen in
chapter two. In making the cloze procedure, the writer read the whole article first, to determine which parts of the articles could be deleted. As the writer quoted
from Lingua Links Library Lane et al., 1998, a cloze procedure must leave all the words in the first 2-3 sentences of the text to let the readers get well into the
passage. Thus, the writer left the 3 sentences to let the readers get well into the
39 passage. After thoroughly analyzing the difficulty and weight of each possible
deletion, the writer deleted some words according to its category as it suggested by Binkley 1983 in Zakaluk 1988.
The writer then analyzed the students’ answer using words categorization as Binkley 1988 suggested in an improvised cloze procedure. The words
categorization is formulated in chapter two.
c. Questionnaire
In addition to cloze procedure and word association technique, the writer also utilizes a questionnaire. Ary et al. 2002 divides questionnaires into two
types: structured and unstructured questionnaires. In structured questionnaires, both questions and answers are provided. Respondents have to choose answers
which suits their own opinions or condition. On the contrary, unstructured questionnaires do not have the responses provided. The participants express their
opinions, suggestions, and conditions with their own words. In this study, the writer combined both types of questionnaire to find
information in answering the research question. Thus, there were some items which let the students to provide his or her answers and there were items which
had options on it. The questionnaire was distributed after the students finished doing their
cloze procedure. Its questions were asking about the students’ opinion about reading English newspaper articles, motivation in reading English newspaper
articles, and opinion about their ability and difficulties encountered while reading the article given in descriptive qualitative study. The questionnaire items were in
