Research Design Instruments RESEARCH METHOD

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD

This chapter presents discussions about 1 research design, 2 instrument, 3 pilot testing, 4 main study. Subject, data collection, scoring, tabulation and data analysis will be discussed in the main study.

A. Research Design

This study was cross-sectional design. Wiersma 1995: 175 argues that cross-sectional design involves data collection at one point in time from a sample or from more than one sample representing two or more populations. He also states that this design was also a type of survey design. Ary, Jacobs, and Razavieh 1990: 67 define survey as a research method which is conducted to collect information about characteristics of a population by examining a sample of that group. On the other hand, they also argued that there was a major disadvantage of cross-sectional design i.e. the possibilities difference between samples seriously bias the result. This designs, however, was usually possible to investigate large number of samples. Hence, this method is extensive and cross-sectional, dealing with a relatively large number of cases at a particular time. Knowing the feature of the data presentation, however, this study used mix procedures to answer research question. The data from quantitative procedures would be the starting point to answer research questions. Then the qualitative procedures were intended to find out data which were used to analyze the 29 phenomena occurred. Since it was not feasible to survey the entire population all classes in Sang Timur Senior High School, the selection of some samples of different year were taken to represent the whole population.

B. Instruments

In order to answer the research questions the researcher used direct observation by means of “checklist” test. Hopkins 1976: 82 argues that a checklist has two major contributions to observation: 1 it is an efficient time-wise method of recording, and 2 the data are objective. This checklist consisted of list of which words came from derivational suffixes that had to be classified by the students based on their lexical category. A simple recorded interview was also conducted in this study. It was aimed to investigate the phenomena occurred after the survey research. The words of the “checklist” included samples of words from A Vocabulary List adapted from: The Thousand Word Little Language, The Second Thousand Word List, Word Power 3000 Purba, 1996, Daftar Kosakata SMU taken from the 2004 CBC and students’ hand book entitled English for a Better Life Yuliani and Permatay, 2005. The last source was aimed to confirm that some words in the “checklist” were the samples of words from their handbook which were regularly read by the students. The main consideration in compiling the words for the checklist was The First 1000 Words of the General Service List Nation’s Appendix, 2002:54- 55. There were some reasons why words of the “checklist” were compiled based on the mentioned sources. Firstly, the word list of the sources provided highly frequency items. Therefore the words in the “checklist” were compiled from the sample of words from the sources mentioned above. Secondly, there was a list of words in the 2004 CBC that was supposed to be taught by Senior High School teachers of first year students. The form of that “checklist” could be seen below. Mark √ the following words, whether they are noun, adjective, verb or adverb. One word may have more than one lexical category. No Words Noun Adjective Verb Adverb 1 Ability 2 Activate 3 Aggressive 4 Agreement 5 Assertive 6 … Table 3.1: Checklist Test The complete “Checklist” test will be presented in the appendices. As defined by Read 2000: 86, second language learners generally know a lot fewer words in target language than native speakers do. It could be inferred that Senior High School students were only accustomed to highly frequency item of words. Considering this condition the study proposed some criteria in determining which words were included in the checklist. First, the headword was the sample of the above mentioned sources. The 2004 CBC word list was the first guideline. Since Senior High School in Indonesia has implemented this curriculum as the main guideline of educational system this study included the sample of words from the 2004 CBC word list. Second, the vocabulary item in the “checklist” was the example of words in the 1 st 2000 thousand words of English taken from Nation 2002: 54-57.

C. Pilot Testing