C. Population and Sample
The population of the study was the fourth semester students of Department of English Education at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University of Jakarta in
academic year 20152016. There were 3 classes; 4A, 4B, and 4C and each class consisted of 17, 23, 23 students. The total number of 3 classes was 63 students.
The target population of this study was chosen because they have already passed or learned the related subjects investigated in this study such as vocabulary,
morphology and reading subjects. According to Cohen, taking the larger sample is better to give greater reliability and facilitate more sophisticated statistics to be
used.
1
Therefore, the study was considered to take large sample for collecting data consisted of 46 students which were selected using purposive sampling technique.
The samples were chosen from 4B and 4C classes of Department of English Education. Meanwhile, the other 17 students from 4A class were involved to be
participants in testing validity and reliability of the research instrument.
D. Instrument of Research
In this study, test was used as the instrument for collecting data. There were two different tests conducted in this study; reading comprehension and collocation
knowledge tests.
1. Reading Comprehension Test
In this study, the reading comprehension test was adopted from Longman Complete Course for the TOEFL Test Preparation for the Computer and Paper
Test by the reason that the book consisted of the TOEFL paper-based test which usually used in the institutional TOEFL. In other words, the test was suitable for
the participants of this study as undergraduate students. After being analyzed manually, the passages in the reading test contained lexical collocation whose
score was appropriate to be correlated with the score of lexical collocation knowledge in order to find its significant relationship.
1
Louise Cohen, et al., Research Method in Education 6
th
Ed., New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 101.
a. Conceptual Definition
Reading comprehension is an ability to understand the meaning of a text by identifying main idea, detailed information, finding reference and similar words,
and making inference of the text. Reading comprehension test was conducted to identify the students’ reading comprehension.
b. Operational Definition
Reading comprehension is an ability shown by the score gained by the students based on the test, which comprises of main idea, detailed information,
reference word, similar word, and inference of text. The test was conducted by using multiple choice test type which consisted of four passages. Total items were
twenty which were divided by five items in each passage. Here was the blue print of reading comprehension test:
Table 3.1 The Blue Print of Reading Comprehension Test
Aspect Indicator
Item Number Total
Item
Comprehending the English
Text. 1. Determining main idea of the text
1, 6, 11, 16 4
2. Identifying stated detail information on the text
3, 13, 20 3
3. Identifying unstated detail information on the text
5, 9, 15 3
4. Making inference based on the text
4, 8, 18 3
5. Finding reference word in the text 7, 14, 17
3 6. Identifying similar word in the
text 2, 10, 12 19
4
TOTAL 20
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