Thinking Process Journal Journals

78 3. After about 90 minutes, their journals were collected.

3.6.5.4 Thinking Process Journal

Good language learners know well how to approach the task of language learning Wenden, 1982 and 1986 in 1987: 22. Researchers may identify unobservable strategies through think-aloud and verbal protocol Cohen, 1987; Arden and Close, 1993, as cited in Nation, 2002: 249. Think-aloud are stream of conscious disclosure of thought processes while information is being attended to Cohen, 1987: 33. The data are basically unedited and unanalyzed and it vocalizes “inner speech” which might be invisible Ericsson and Simon, 1993 or the learner externalizes the contents of the mind while doing something Mann, 1982. Halbach 2000 managed to identify invisible strategies through writing diaries. Further, Merawati 2003 succeeded in evaluating learners’ guessing strategies which were to some extend similar to reading strategies by means of writing out learners’ strategies while they were guessing meanings of unfamiliar words from context as suggested by Nation 2002: 223, Arden and Close 1986. This technique was used to evaluate learners’ thinking process or direct strategies especially guessing strategies, and language knowledge development. The design was similar to the journals, except for the lack of guiding questions. It required blank paper for the students to write their applied strategies when they were guessing the meaning of new word from context. In Cycle 1, the students were allowed to select any one or two new words from authentic texts dealing with Idul Fitri and Fasting. Some of the provided texts were taken from “Bandung Advertiser” 2006; however learners were allowed to select any texts downloaded from website or taken from the available newspaper “Jakarta Post”. In Cycle 2, the students were given a text “What do surveyors do?” taken from Time Life’s Illustrated World of Science: Earth and Its Feature Priest, 1994. To prevent the students from applying deductive strategies, the words were modified into nonsense words Nation, 2002. These nonsense words still had their original suffixes to help learners decide the parts of speech. Two stem words 79 appeared several times with different suffixes; such as ‘gauge’ becames ‘egaug, egauging’ and ‘bounce’ becames ‘ounces, ounced’. In Cycle 3, the texts were taken from “The pace and price of progress’ and ‘Can land be ‘saved’ from the sea?’ taken from Time Life’s Illustrated World of Science: Earth and Its Feature Priest, 1994. There were 6 repeated words for 17 tokens. Three of them were very specialized words, i.e. terpen 4 tokens and bulwarks 1 token, and polders 4 tokens. The other three were nonsense words Nation, 2002: 234, 236, 254 i.e. ‘tendainment’ instead of ‘environment’, ‘inared’ instead of ‘drained’, and ‘fexrly’ instead of ‘early’. The six words were selected because they were related with other words such as ‘bulwarks’ to ‘terpen’ and ‘dyke’. To have natural reading and to apply word-attack skills, the words were not marked at their first appearances so that readers might skip these unknown words and then reread them. The suffixes of the original words were still embedded at the end of the nonsense words; this was to help the students identify the catagories of words based on the words’ morphemes i.e. suffixes or word-parts. They contained 682 words and seven illustrations. These texts, including the nonsense words, were predicted to have about 4 of new words. This instrument was used when the students were reading English texts in the classrooms, and doing assignments at home. The procedure had several steps: 1. The students were given some related reading materials. 2. The students read the texts. 3. The students guessed the new words in Cycle 1 and 2 or the underlined words in Cycle 3, and while guessing they wrote the strategies and their thinking process. 4. The time allocated in Cycle 1 is 20 minutes 2 words, the students did it in SALL. In Cycle 2 and 3, they did these assignments at home, because it was time consuming and the students needed stress free environent. The written thinking process journals were, then, copied, categorized, cut, grouped and displayed. Matrices and tables by means of computer ‘EXEL’ program 80 were also developed. The results were compared and tallied. The quality of students’ thinking process was then converted into quantity by means of: the total number of thinking steps applied was divided by the total number of words guessed. To obtain the average achievement of the students within each cycle, the result of each student’s strategies was added and then divided by the number of the students. The results were then compared with the other students or the results of other cycles.

3.6.6 Informal Interview