C. Research Subjects
As pointed out by Johnson 1992, the persons involved in an experimental study are called subjects rather than participants p. 173. The use of the word
“subjects” may sound dehumanizing, but “this is merely conventional terminology from psychology and other disciplines and not intended to be dehumanizing.
” The study involved only one class of Vocabulary I of the 20112012
academic year at the English Extension Course, which belongs to Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta. The reason for choosing the research subjects was because
they were the only viable option as far as the researcher was concerned as the students learned only the English vocabulary and no other subject matters and
language skills, such as speaking, writing, listening, or reading were involved in the classroom.
D. Instruments and Data Gathering Technique
There were two types of instruments that the researcher used in order to gather the data required for the importance of the study. One instrument was in the
form of tests, which consisted of the pretest and posttest, and the other was in the form of questionnaire, filled out by the research subjects on December 20, 2011,
after they completed their Vocabulary I final test.
1. Tests
The tests which were used in this study were carried out twice. The first one was conducted before the researcher implemented the guessing from context
procedure in the classroom. Hence, it was called the pretest. This pretest would
provide the researcher with useful information on the students’ initial ability to
infer a word’s meaning out of its context without using any particular guessing
from context procedure. The scores of the pretest would then be compared to those of the posttest, which would be conducted upon the completion of the
vocabulary learning technique implementation in the classroom, to see whether Clarke and Nation’s guessing from context procedure helped them improve their
vocabulary learning process. In the posttest, however, the research subjects were faced with 10 test items to answer using Clarke and Nation’s guessing from
context procedure.
2. Questionnaire
Apart from the pretest and posttest, the researcher also employed questionnaire as one the research instruments. The questionnaire was distributed
to the whole group of the research subjects subsequent to the implementation of the guessing from context procedure as a vocabulary learning technique in the
classroom, which was on the final test day of the Vocabulary I class. The questionnaire would provide beneficial information on how the students view
Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context after being exposed to the procedure for two meetings. The questionnaire consisted of open-ended and
closed-ended questions in order for the researcher to elicit as much useful, specific information as possible from the students.
In addition to the tests and questionnaire as research instruments, the researcher also had to teach the students how to guess the meanings of unknown
words using Clarke and Nation’s procedure for guessing from context. The
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