37 study, to take into account other factors affecting reading comprehension ability
in reading the selected article. The writer utilized those formulas because they were already built-in on
Microsoft Word 2007. These instruments then were utilized to calculate the level of readability of articles taken from The Jakarta Post.
2. Instruments used in the Descriptive Qualitative Research
To gather data which also answers the research question, in the descriptive qualitative study the writer utilized three instruments: word association technique,
cloze procedure, and questionnaire.
a. Word Association Technique
The writer employed this technique as suggested by Zakaluk, Samuels, and Taylor 1986 in Zakaluk and Samuels 1988. The tester in this case, the writer
must choose a ‘word or phrase that embodies the main of the topic as stimulus’ Zakaluk and Samuels, 1988. The test takers or the students must write as many
as words or ideas they can think of in association with the key words any words or phrase which serve as stimulus.
The writer also followed their suggestion by employing lined papers in which the stimulus words were printed at the beginning of each line. This kind of
stimulus functioned as cue words for students. By writing the cue words on the beginning of each line, the writer assumed that it had ensured students not to use
the newly produced words for cue words, although it was still possible that they were still influenced by the newly produced words.
38 Students who could produce ten or more than ten acceptable units of idea are
considered as above average, while the students who could only provide words not more than ten are considered as below average. The limit of maximum ten is
taken as it is also suggested by Zakaluk and Samuels 1988. How the writer employed this and what cue words used then, will be discussed further in chapter
four. The result of the calculation using formulas determined which articles would be used and what cue words would be written at each line.
b. Cloze Procedure
One of the instruments to answer the research questions was a cloze procedure. The article used for cloze procedure is based on the result of predicting
the readability of ‘Headline’ articles on The Jakarta Post. The writer utilized the most suitable article for first graders of senior high school based on the
computation results of readability formulas. The form of the cloze procedure was the improved one. It was not a
standardized ratio of deletion; rather it was rational deletion version as Binkley 1988 suggested. The improvised cloze procedure, which is the selective
deletions, has proven to have greater instructional effect than random deletions Jongsma, 1980. The details of this type of cloze procedure can be seen in
chapter two. In making the cloze procedure, the writer read the whole article first, to determine which parts of the articles could be deleted. As the writer quoted
from Lingua Links Library Lane et al., 1998, a cloze procedure must leave all the words in the first 2-3 sentences of the text to let the readers get well into the
passage. Thus, the writer left the 3 sentences to let the readers get well into the
