Both teachers and students did not make use of it much since it was not the time when technology use was very common.
When I was in Junior High school, the teacher usually used textbooks and LCD projector as the media. PowerPoint like this was rarely used. The
PowerPoint which was used was not the interactive one. It was the common one which was used to present materials. The teacher often displayed the materials
using it. Ra2.J4
The teacher did that because the book had not been printed. The teacher sometimes also printed some pages from the soft file of the textbooks, copied
those pages, and distributed those to students. Rani further mentioned about the situation in the classroom at that time. She said that it was noisy just like the other
classrooms. It happened everywhere, in any junior high schools. It was a common thing which happened every day. The students had a habit of talking with their
friends much that it made the class noisy.
Junior high school students had tendency to talk a lot with their classmates during the class, so the class was noisy. I also felt nervous. The situation was
tense because the teacher liked to point some students and asked them to answer the questions especially in listening class. He also did it in the reading class.
Ra5.J4
2. Field Notes
IPALL played a role of a tutor which was like what Hsu et al. 2000 as quoted in Ramanair and Sagat 2007 mention, “As a tutor, computer technology
is utilized as a system that presents the subject to which the learners will respond and provides a learning environment which is controlled.” During vocabulary
learning, students responded to the exercises given which were made based on the topics that they have learnt. They had to also read the instructions about how to do
those exercises. Students had to pay attention to the instructions in order to avoid technical problems and be able to do the exercises well. Based on what had been
written down on the field notes, the general empirical meaning found was students were not anti-technology and students enjoyed the vocabulary learning process
because they had chances to repeat. The fact that students were not anti-technology could be seen from their
calmness every time they had to do exercises in the IPALL. None of the students complained that it was too difficult to operate. It also turned out that when
students said ‘wah...’, it was not because they were unable to use the IPALL, but it was because they knew that if they were not careful enough, they would obtain
unsatisfying results. Students did not claim to face difficulties because the instructions written on the second slide of the IPALL was also clear. It was even
clearer because the teacher always explained the instructions again and again before the students did exercises in IPALL. One of the students told the teacher
that she was having a problem with the IPALL. However, it was not a major problem. She could continue her work after the teacher helped her. Unlike blog in
the study conducted by Lin, Lin Groom 2013, IPALL did not cause anxiety. It was because once students clicked the ‘confirm’ button, the score was displayed
on their own computer screen. The IPALL did not have the feature like blog which enabled people to see each other’s results.
Students were also able to take their time. As what I saw during the observation, none of them worked in a hurry. They knew they had three chances
to do the exercises. Therefore, they did it very carefully without having to be afraid that they would be left behind. While some students had finished doing the
exercises quickly, the other students remained calm. They were not affected by the fact that their other friends were quicker than they were. Some students
mentioned that there were questions in which quite difficult for them and thus, they picked the wrong answers. However, I saw them tried harder to understand
the questions before they repeated doing the exercises again.
3. Documents
The two participants of this research shared their experience and what they did and felt during the vocabulary learning using IPALL. They wrote their
experience briefly and submitted it to the teacher. I used their personal notes as a source to seek meaning. It was because what the participant wrote, although it was
not deep yet, was a part of the whole empirical and transcendent meaning which had been constructed during vocabulary learning using IPALL. It was also like
what Creswell 2012: p. 223 stated that, “Documents represent a good source for text word data for a qualitative study. They provide the advantage of being in
the language and words of participants, who have usually given thoughtful attention to them.” What the participants wrote was a reflection on what was in
their mind. It was their true feelings about to what extent IPALL was meaningful to their life as students.
At first Rani did not know what exactly IPALL was, She thought that IPALL would not make any difference in vocabulary learning. She said,
