The Implementation of Clarke and Nation’s Guessing from Context

The first step of Clarke and Nation’s guessing from context procedure is undoubtedly the easiest of all the steps. The students did not find much difficulty determining the parts of speech of the underlined words although they needed to be reminded of the parts of speech noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in the beginning. In the second and third steps of the procedure, the students were required to observe the relations of the unknown word to the others word in the context which modified it and look at any conjunction or punctuation which could serve as a clue. These two steps proved to be the most challenging for the students. They seemed to struggle to understand the relations between the words and sentences and find the conjuctions and punctuations which could have helped them a great deal in guessing the meaning of the unknown words. This was reflected later in the posttest, where most of the mistakes they committed were found in these two steps of the guessing from context procedure. Unfortunately, the assignment could not be finished on time for it to be discussed at the end of the class. Before the class was dismissed, the researcher assigned the students to finish the rest of the practice at home and to bring some English newspaper articles to class the following week. On the next meeting, many of the students told the researcher they had not had the time to finish the assignment due to their college and work commitments. Several of them also did not bring the English newspaper articles as they were told the previous week. Fortunately, the researcher had already anticipated this by compiling a number of sentences taken from various English newspapers. In this meeting, the researcher asked the students to form groups of four to five to do the assignment. The researcher went around the classroom to help those needing guidance with the task. Some of the students were enthusiastic and asked a lot of questions, but some others were too hesitant to do so. Finally, they were posttested to see if the guessing from context procedure helped them improve them learn vocabulary. The posttest was carried out on November 29, 2011. The students had to answer 10 posttest items using Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context in 100 minutes’ time. There were originally 20 test items to be answered by the students, but they were reduced to just 10 items after the researcher consulted the lecturer in charge of the Vocabulary I class. The results of the pretest and posttest played a significant role in determining the effectiveness of the guessing from context procedure as a vocabulary learning technique. Originally, the research was going to involve two groups of subjects. The researcher had planned to give each group a different treatment. One group was to be told to memorize a list of words before being tested. This was the vocabulary learning technique used in Vocabulary I and II classes in the English Education Study Program during the 20072008 academic year. The other group were to be taught Clarke and Nation’s guessing from context procedure. However, this design did not seem to be fair to the first group because they would not learn something new. Considering this problem, the researcher decided to change the design.

B. The Results of the Implementation of Clarke and Nation’s Guessing

from Context Procedure The second part of this chapter reveals the results of the experimental study. The results include the pretest, posttest, and dependent t-test result, the research objects’ responses to the questionnaire, and the mistakes done by the students in using Clarke and Nation’s guessing from context procedure in the posttest.

1. The Pretest and Posttest Results

The first part of this chapter serves to provide an answer the first research question, which is whether Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context significantly improved the vocabulary learning process of the first semester students of the English Extension Program at Sanata Dharma University. Before the research subjects were exposed to Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context, the researcher conducted a pretest to acquire a set of scores which the posttest scores would be compared to using the dependent t-test. The participants had to answer a total of 20 test items in 30 minutes’ time without using any guessing procedure. They basically only had to write down what they thought were the synonyms of the underlined words in context taken from a number o f newspapers’ websites. In the posttest, however, they had only 10 items to answer within 75 minutes ’ time. Although the students had to answer fewer test items in the posttest than they did in the pretest, they had considerably much more time as it required them to answer each test item using Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context. In the end, there were only 15 students who completed both the pretest and posttest. This was due to the fact that most of them already had jobs or were students of other majors. Therefore, there were always absentees, which was inevitable. Table 4.1 displays the participants’ performances in both of the tests, the difference between each student’s pretest, and posttest scores and the square of each difference, which are required to determine the t value. Table 4.1 The Students’ Pretest and Posttest Scores Participant Number Pretest Score Posttest Score Difference Squared Difference 1. 6 4 -2 4 2. 5,5 7 1,5 2.25 3. 4 5 1 1 4. 5,5 6 0,5 0.25 5. 4 6 2 4 6. 5 6 1 1 7. 7,5 7 -0,5 0.25 8. 5 4 -1 1 9. 3,5 7 3,5 12.25 10. 5 2 -3 9 11. 5,5 6 0,5 0.25 12. 5,5 8 2,5 6.25 13. 5,5 6 0,5 0.25 14. 5 8 3 9 15. 1,5 2 0,5 0.25 ∑D=10 ∑D 2 =51 Having determined the total of the score differences and the squared score differences, the researcher now proceeds to calculating the t value to determine whether or not the mean of the posttest scores are significantly higher than that of the pretest scores. In order to find the t value, the researcher used the formula for the dependent t-test, which can be seen in Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3. From the equation shown in Figure 3.2, the t value equals 1.451. In order to see if this value indicates a significantly higher mean of the posttest scores, the t value has to be matched with the required t value at the .05 significance level for a directional test previously set by the researcher before the experimentation. The t value needed for significance at the .05 level of significance for a directional test with 14 degrees of freedom is 1.761. The t of 1.451 does not exceed the t value needed for significance. This implies that the mean of the posttest scores is not significantly higher than the mean of the pretest scores. a. The Retention of the Null Hypothesis In Chapter III, the researcher stated the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis to this research. Having calculated the t value and consulted the t table, the researcher can now either retain or reject the null hypothesis. Here are the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis once again:  Null Hypothesis H There is no significant difference between the mean of the pretest scores and the mean of the posttest scores.