34 during September 2007. In the mentioned period, the theses consisted of twenty
subjects in total. Due to the mentioned time setting, the writer of the subject studied came from different academic years.
All the writers of the subject studied were L2 learners; that is that they were not English native speakers. They were from various academic performances
high, average, and low. Therefore, their language competences were also various. Yet the variation of language competences was considered insignificant
in this research.
C. Research Instruments
There were fiveinstruments that were employed in this research. The first one was Concordance v.3.2. This is free-trial software issued by R.J.C. Watt. The
software was used to analyze text by its single individual word and how many times a word was used in the text. This is the first step to analyze the words that
were employed in the translated abstract. The texts that were input in the software were abstracts of the Economic Faculty students and abstracts of international
economic journals. The second instrument was Wordsmith Tools v.5. This software was used
to examine a word and its surrounding context that created collocations. After obtaining the collocation, the writer managed the tabulation of collocation that is
used in the abstracts. The tabulation was divided into tabulation of grammatical collocation and lexical collocation.
35 The third instrument was Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of
English. This was a dictionary that provide huge amount of entry and its collocation from different parts of speech. This instrument was used to decide
whether or not certain collocation in the translated abstract existed in the collocation dictionary. To support the decision, Oxford Advanced Learner’s
Dictionary was used as the fourth instrument. The last instrument used in this research is human instrument. Having enganged in the Concordance v.3.2 and
Wordsmith Tools v.5, the researcher himself decided which collocations that would be included as data. Then, the writer gathered the data by consulting the
existence of collocations in the dictionaries.
D. Data Gathering Technique
The data was collected from the thesis abstracts of the undergraduate students of the Economics Faculty that had been submitted and input in library
computer database in September 2007. The thesis abstracts intended to be analyzed were abstracts of undergraduate students regardless the admission year.
The total documents that were copied and were going to be analyzed were twenty thesis abstracts. Since the data were input in PDF format, the whole parts of the
theses were converted into word file. Therefore, the writer extracted the abstracts in Indonesian and in English in the next step. After the whole data had been
collected, the research was conducted. Since Concordance v.3.2 and Wordsmith Tools v.5 could only process file
in .txt format, therefore, the writer converted the word file in both abstracts of the
36 Economics Faculty students and international journal into text file as the database.
After the data were obtained, the writer sorted out the collocation that would be analyzed. The collocations that had been sorted out were then classified based on
types of collocation.
E. Data Analysis Technique
