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chosen not “for representativeness but because of its uniqueness or that it can be used to illustrate an issue”. Thirdly, this study focused on one single entity occurring in its natural environment
without manipulation and this is one characteristic of case study in qualitative research as indicated by Merriam 1991. Finally, the study investigated one single, low-scale case but
provided an in-depth analysis, which is another feature of case study as proposed by Bordens and Abbott 2008, Conolle, et. al. 1990, Nunan and Bailey 2009, and Stake in Silverman, 2005.
All these characteristics indicate that the present study fall under the category of case study. More specifically, this study used text analysis due to its focus of investigation, i.e. on
written texts Merriam, 1991; Travers, 2001. As pointed out by Travers ibid, the procedure of textual analysis in case study follows the procedures laid out in the related theory. For this
purpose, this study incorporated Grammatical Metaphor developed by Halliday 1994, Halliday and Mathiessen 2004 and Martin 1992 in analyzing the texts under investigation. Regarding
Functional Grammar, the framework in which grammatical metaphor originated, Freebody cited in Emilia, 2007, states that it is “one of a variety of linguistic approaches that have been well
developed in the area of education”.
3.4 Research Settings and Participants
The study investigated nine writing assignments of three students of a state postgraduate school in Bandung. Thus, three assignments were taken from each participant, each of which was
written for assignment in their first three semesters at the university. The three participants were chosen based on their GPAs, each of whom representing low-achievers with the GPA of 2.95
low achiever GPA ranges between 2.80-3.00; average-achievers with the GPA of 3.30 mid achiever GPA ranges between 3.15 – 3.45, and high-achievers with the GPA of 3.62 high
achiever GPA ranges between 3.50 and 3.80.
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The nature of participants’ involvement in this study was voluntary. Bordens and Abbott 2008 suggest that voluntary-based participants have two major disadvantages, these are: 1
volunteer bias, and 2 the ungeneralizable nature of the research findings. These disadvantages were not issues in the study because: 1 the object of the study was the texts written by the
participants, not the participants who wrote them, for their course assignments -- not for the study; and 2 as stated previously that case study, the type of qualitative study this study belongs
to, is not intended to make generalization but to investigate one particular case Hood, 2009. The limitation of nine research articles in the study was for the purpose of comprehensive
analysis since larger amount of data would not allow such comprehensiveness. In addition, the rationale behind the involvement of the written work of the three participants in this study was
the fact that they were products of adult writers whose exposure to the mature scientific written work through their education entails likelihood of grammatical metaphor incorporation in their
texts Christie, 2002; Christie and Derewianka, 2008; Halliday, 1993 which was the main interest of this study.
3.5 Data Collection
