RESEARCH QUESTION RESEARCH BENEFIT PRODUCT SPECIFICATION

8 In order to formulate a right concept and design of a testing instrument to measure the written English competence of elementary school’s students, this research will work on four key problems noted to clarify, that are: Elementary School English Learners, English Testing, Communicative Written English Competence, and English Teaching and Learning in Elementary Schools of Indonesia.

D. RESEARCH FOCUS

The former parts of this chapter have explored the problems which might reveal in formulating a testing model for written English competence of elementary school students. Within the ‘revealed’ problems, the focus of this research will be limited specifically to the communicative written English competence of Indonesian elementary school students and the development of its theoretical testing model.

E. RESEARCH LIMITATION

This research will use Research and Development method in formulating the concept so as developing the instrument. In the Research and Development procedure, a researcher should conduct a cicly which containts 10 phases. Yet, due to the limitation of time available for the researcher, this research will only be limited to five phases of the required ten phases. The validation of the product will be conducted through a construct validation by four TEYL professionals and a ‘semi’ trial test conducted in a small number of the test taker candidates as the supplement to the experts’ improvement feedbacks.

F. RESEARCH QUESTION

The previous part of this chapter has identified the rationale behind the conducting of the research, the research position, the problem identification and the 9 research focus of the intended research. The following are the problems of the research which are formulated into two research questions: 1 What is the written English competence of Indonesia elementary school students like? 2 What is the measurement instrument of the written English competence of Indonesia elementary school students like?

G. RESEARCH BENEFIT

Measurement as a part of evaluation is critical to improve the quality of the teaching and learning system. Measurement in a form of testing is probably considered as the most applied evaluation method in language education. Meanwhile, language competence is something which is abstract. To empirically see it, people mostly prefer language testing as the method of gathering information as it is considered to have more objective result. The result will enable the educational stakeholders to see how far the goal or objective of the learning and teaching process is successfully conducted. Thus, developing an effective testing model which can measure the achievement of the learning teaching process is really interesting and critical. This research is conducted in order to formulate the theoretical testing model to measure the communicative written English competence of Indonesian elementary school English learners. Hopefully, the result of this research can provide an alternative measurement instrument that can contribute to the improvement of quality of English teaching in the level of elementary education. 10

H. PRODUCT SPECIFICATION

The product of this research will hopefully be the theoretical testing model blue print and its prototype of Test of Communicative English for Elementary School Students of Indonesia TOESI. The product is theoretically developed based on the concept of English teaching and measurement which is suitable for Indonesian elementary school students and eliminated from the influences of any changes on the national curriculum policy. 11

CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW