Tense The Research Design The Population and Sample

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2.2. Tense

According to House and Susan 1950:116, ”Tense is the form of a verb takes to indicate the time of the action or the state of being; as present, past, and future”. Stein Jess 1962:1463 defines, “Tense as category of verbal inflection found in some languages that specifies the time, the length of occurance of the action or states expressed by a verb”. From this definition, it can be stated that tenses are able to specify the time and expressed by the length of the occurance of the action. An occurance can be expressed by the verb. House and Susan 1950:116 stated that Modern English has nine tenses which is commonly used in the living language, three of which are simple basic tenses, three of which are compound perfect tenses, and three of which are expanded progressive tenses. The simple basic tenses are simple present, simple past, and simple future. The compound perfect tenses are present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect. The expanded progressive tenses are present continuous, past continuous, and future continuous. Universitas Sumatera Utara 20

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1. The Research Design

The design of this research is descriptive research. Gay 1984 stated that the descriptive research involves collecting data to answer questions.

3.2. The Population and Sample

In this research, the population for the research is the 20072008 second year students of SMK Negeri 2 Pematangsiantar. The total number of the population is 200 students. They are in 6 classes : II TP1, II TP2 Tehnik Mesin Perkakas, II ILD1, II ILD2 Tehnik Instalasi Listrik Dasar, II KB1, II KB2 Konstruksi Bangunan. The distribution of the research population is shown below. Table 3.1. Distribution of Research Population No Class Number of Students 1 II TP1 33 2 IITP2 33 3 II ILD1 33 4 II ILD2 33 5 II KB1 34 6 II KB2 34 TOTAL 200 Universitas Sumatera Utara 21 Considering that the number of the population is great enough and since there is the limitation time, energy, and fund, not all the students of the second year become the sample of this research. A sample is part of population, which was chosen to represent the population. For the efficiency and practically of the research, the second year students are chosen randomly to represent the population. There are six classes altogether and four classes consist of 33 and two classes are 34 students and the total number of the second year students is 200 students. So, the writer chooses 5 students from each class as the sample. It is presented by distributing or giving the paper to the students. The students who get the paper with the word “sample” become the respondents. The population has the same chance to be the member of sample. They are not classified on the basis of their grade of intelligence. Thus, there are 30 students as the respondents. The sample in this research is 15 . As Arikunto 2002:112 says, “If the population consists of a large number, the sample can be taken from 10 - 15 or 20 - 25 or more, it depends on the ability of researcher by considering time, energy, and fund. In obtaining the sample, the writer of this thesis used random sampling technique. Considering what Gay 1984:104 says that random sampling is the best single way to obtain a representatives sample.

3.3. The Instrument of Collecting the Data