Research Question THE STUDY

15 The first part of the questionnaire presented a short introduction, covering my identity, the purpose of the study, and also a promise to keep the respondents‟ identity as confidential. Still in this part, 21 close-ended items in the form of a Likert scale and 1 regular close-ended item were presented. These items were implicitly categorized under 4 themes, namely social, academic, and fairness aspects, as well as conditions for successful group work. This categorization was done to assist me to obtain more organized data to be analyzed later on. The second part asked for the demographical information of the students, including their age, gender, length of studying English, as well as length of experiencing group work learning strategy in the school. Furthermore, the last part questioned about the optional inf ormation on the respondents‟ name and phone number. This information could be later used as a way to have some personal communications with some respondents if there were parts needed to figure out more. As discussed earlier, a Likert scale was used. As Likert 1932 points out, to use a Likert scale, the researcher has to present a set of statements along with the space for the respondents‟ judgments, ranging from extremely positive to negative ones. Following this model, I designed a series of statements related to the advantages and disadvantages of group work derived from the previous studies and some informal conversations with several twelfth graders. In each statement, I provided spaces for each statement in the form of a table to ease the respondents to respond, regarding to what extent they agreed or disagreed with each written statement. 16 In this study, I used an even-number Likert scale since I believed that the use of an odd-number scale would enlarge the unreliability level of the data due to the inclination of the respondents to select the middle options Cronbach, 1950. Responding to this, I applied a 4-point scale in the study, ranging from strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. In that way, it was hoped that the respondents were triggered to think more critically before judging the available options for each statement.

5. Data Collection Procedure

Data collection took place during the second semester of the academic session 20142015. Before the real data were collected, I piloted the questionnaires to one class of the eleventh graders instead of the twelfth graders, with the aim of being able to generalize the results of my study for the twelfth graders, as my real participants. The results of the piloting were very useful to give me some clues on which items in the questionnaires were still confusing or even unclear for the respondents. After having the final version of the questionnaire items, I met two English teachers who were responsible for teaching the twelfth graders to get the permission in distributing the questionnaire sheets to the students. In personal meetings with each teacher, I arranged schedules to decide what class and time I was allowed to enter each target class. In entering each target class, I introduced myself and explained the purpose of the study prior to the questionnaire dissemination. I also explained that the results of the