Method Participants Instrument A study on the depth of vocabulary knowledge acquired by the third semester students of english education study program of Sanata Dharma University.

29 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY Introduction This chapter presents discussion on the procedure of the study. The discussion includes the discussion on the research methodology used on the study, the subjects of the study, the instrument used to gather the data, the procedure of data gathering and the procedure to analyze the data in order to answer the problem formulations mentioned in the first chapter.

A. Method

The present study is a descriptive qualitative study. Fraenkel 1993: 380 affirms that studies investigate the quality of relationships, activities, situations, or materials are referred to as qualitative research. The study investigated the students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge by analyzing documents of self­report on the students’ knowledge on the meaning of five tested English verbs see, keep, make, get, ask and was intended to give a general description on the students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge. The interpretation of the data was descriptive in nature and it did not deal with any hypothesis testing so that the study was a descriptive qualitative study. Before conducting the research, library and journals study was done to find and select the appropriate theories and informations related to the study in order to find out the answer to the problem formulation mentioned in the first chapter. 30

B. Participants

The participants of the study were one class of third semester students of English Education Study Program of Sanata Dharma University attending Extensive Reading I course. The third semester students were chosen with the assumption that they have had adequate English vocabulary mastery since they have passed courses on Vocabulary I, Vocabulary II, Reading I and Reading II. Therefore, a picture of depth of vocabulary knowledge of L2 learners that is focused to learn English in the sophomore stage could be obtained.

C. Instrument

In order to find out the answer to the research questions, the study used the modified version of Vocabulary knowledge Scale proposed by Wesche and Paribakht 1997: 180. Vocabulary knowledge Scale is a generic instrument that it could be used to measure any set of words Read, 2000: 132; Mukarto, 2005: 152. It consists of two scales: one for eliciting responses from the test­takers and one for scoring the responses. The first scale is presented with the words to be tested. It has five categories representing how well the test­takers know the words. The categories range from 1 representing complete unfamiliarity to 5 representing the ability to use a word with grammatical and semantic accuracy in a sentence Mukarto, 2005: 154. The modified version of the VKS asked the test­takers to write as many as examples of synonyms or translations and illustrate the use of each synonym and translation in sentences, in case that they choose categories IV and V. The modification to the original VKS was done in order to explore the test­takers 31 vocabulary knowledge so that it could give clearer picture of the students’ vocabulary knowledge. The scale of scoring was not used because the test results were not scored instead the words which the students have written in the VKS were tabulated. The tested verbs were taken from Collins Cobuild Dictionary. They were see, get, keep, take, draw, make, run, kill, carry, and ask. The ten tested verbs were all high frequency words. High frequency verbs were chosen because they usually had more extended meaning than the low frequency words so that they could give more opportunity to the students to explore their vocabulary knowledge in the test. See Appendix II for the instrument used.

D. Data Gathering Procedure