vulnerable populations. American Educational Research Association, 2002: 3,
before collecting the data, the researcher consulted and asked the permission from the head of English Language Education Study Program, Sanata Dharma
University, personally and through the letter of consent dated 14 May 2014. The letter of consent is attached in the appendixes. For the participants’ rights, the
researcher ensured the participants had a complete understanding of the purpose and the methods to be used in the study by explaining to the participants before
and after they did the implicature Multiple-choice DCTs. The researcher also gave a short explanation on implicature to the participant. In this present study, the
researcher used numbers instead of the participants’ names due to the participants’ privacy.
C. Research Instrument
Concerning the research question which aims to see the students’ pragmatic competence, the research instrument being used was a multiple choice
test. The researcher chose a multiple choice test because the researcher was not intend to investigate the students’ competence in producing or uttering
implicature, but their competence in interpreting and understanding implicature in spoken English language.
In conducting the research, the researcher did not create the multiple choice test by himself in order to be able to present the more authentic context.
The assessment of pragmatics contains a tension between the construction of authentic assessment tasks and practicality; tests must
establish the social context of conversation and learner responses should be productive, but real world situation are difficult to stimulate and
scoring by several human raters is often not possible. McNamara and Roover, 2006: 54.
The researcher also based on Kasper’s 2000 statement as follows: Spoken interaction includes authentic discourse, elicited conversation
and role-plays which produce oral data and allow the examination of various discourse features. Questionnaires, by contrast, include
production and multiple choice questionnaires as well as scaled response instruments. Kasper, 2000: 317
Based on this condition, the researcher decided to combine Roover’s 2005 and Bouton’s 1988 that have been proved to be valid, although the
researcher provided the blueprint of the questionnaire to prove that the multiple choice test being used matched with the present study. One example of a multiple
choice test is as follows:
Susan and Mei-Ling are roommates and are getting ready to go to class together
. Mei-Ling
: Is it very cold out this morning? Susan
: It’s August. What is Susan saying?
a. It’ll be nice and warm today. Don’t worry. b. Yes, even though it’s August, it’s very cold out.
c. It’s so warm for this time of year that it seems like August. d. Yes, we’re sure having crazy weather, aren’t we?
adopted from Bouton, 1988: 194 From the example above, we can see that the multiple choice test consists of three
parts. The first part is a situational description, the second part is a brief dialogue, and the last part contains question which requires the respondents to comprehend
the last turn of the dialogue and choose the most appropriate meaning pragmatic comprehension.
There were 20 numbers of multiple choice test being used in the present study, number 1 – 11 were adopted from Rover 2005 and number 12 -20 were
adopted from Bouton 1988. The multiple choice test could be seen in Appendix 1. The blueprint was also made to see the content validity, as Hughes 1989
suggests “the content validity of the test could also be determined by a blueprint” Hughes, 1989: 22. The following table will show the blueprint of the multiple
choice test being used.
Table 3.1.The blueprint of the test
No. Implicature Characteristic Questionnaire number
1 Relevance
3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 17 2
Pope Question relevance 6, 11, 13, 16,
3 Manner
1, 5, 10, 20 4
Quality 2, 9, 14
5 Quantity
15, 18, 19
The Multiple-choice test used can be seen in the Appendix I.
D. Data Collection
The data was collected separately for each semester level, and each level had the same length of time duration. The time duration given was 30 minutes.
All the participants could manage to finish the Multiple-choice test in time.
E. Data Analysis Technique