Human as a Research Instrument Document

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D. Instruments and Data Gathering Technique

This parts elaborates the instruments of the research in order to answer the research questions as well as the data gathering technique of the research. Then, in order to solve the two research problems, this research employed three kinds of instruments in gaining the data. They are human instrument, document, and interview.

1. Human as a Research Instrument

In conducting a qualitative research, human does play an important role to gather and to analyze the data. In qualitative studies, the human investigator is considered the primary instrument to gather and to analyze data Ary et al., 2002, p. 421. According to Lincoln and Cuba 1985, since qualitative research studies human experiences and situations, researchers need a flexible instrument to be able to capture the complexity of the human experience as cited in Ary et al., 2002, p. 421. In addition, Lincoln and Cuba further believe that only a human instrument is able to do this task as cited in Ary et al., 2002, p. 421. In this research, the researcher collected and read students’ written work, analyzed subject-verb agreement errors which occurred in their written work and interviewed them to find out the factors why they made those errors. It could be said that the researcher became the one who obtained and analyzed the data. The researcher, therefore, could be classified as the research instrument for his contribution in the research. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 51

2. Document

In this research, the documents analyzed were students’ written work of their Progress Test II. The documents were used as the research instrument in order to answer the first research question, which is “what are subject-verb agreement errors that are made by students in Paragraph Writing class of ELESP?” The researcher decided to use students’ written work of their Progress Test II as the research instrument because of the assumption that all sentences in the students’ written work to analyze were originally written by students in the Paragraph Writing class who at that time had studied the theories of paragraph writing in the selected class for some months, who had studied and had prepared themselves for their Progress Test II, who had the same time given by the lecturer in the classroom to do the test. Besides, the written work to analyze was also made by students who had the same learning environment when they did the test. Another consideration why the researcher decided to use students’ written work of their Progress Test II as the research instrument was because in the Progress Test II, students were asked to write a descriptive text, which required students to use Present Tense in writing the text. The researcher considered that he would find various subject-verb agreement errors of the agreement in number and in person to analyze by analyzing the written work whose all sentences were written in Present Tense. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 52

3. Interview