i
STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD
ASSESSMENT IN
EXTENSIVE READING
THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan
Fitria Desy Pratiwi 112011046
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION PROGRAM
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
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COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
This thesis contains no such material as has been submitted for examination in any course or accepted for the fulfillment of any degree or diploma in any university. To the best my knowledge and my belief, this contains no material previously published or written by any other person expect where due references is made in the text.
Copyright@2015. Fitria Desy Pratiwi and Rindang Widiningrum, M.Hum.
All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be produced by any means without permission of at least one of the copyright owner or the English Language Education Program, Faculty of Language and Literature, Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga.
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Study Program : English Language Education Program Faculty : Language and Literature
Kind of Work : Undergraduate Thesis
In developing my knowledge, I agree to provide SWCU with non-exclusive royalty free right for my intellectual property and the contents therein entitled:
Students’ Attitudes toward Assessment in Extensive Reading
With this non-exclusive royalty free right, SWCU maintains the right to copy, reproduce, print, publish, post, display, incorporate, store in or scan into a retrieval system or database, transmit, broadcast, barter, or sell my intellectual property, in whole or in part without my express written permission, as long as my name is still included as the writer.
This declaration is made according to the best of my knowledge. Made in : Salatiga
Date :
Verified by signee,
Fitria Desy Pratiwi
Approved by:
Rindang Widiningrum, M.Hum. Anita Kurniawati, M.Hum.
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D. Instrument of Data Collection ... 16
E. Data Collection Procedure ... 16
F. Data Analysis Procedure ... 16
Findings and Discussion ... 17
A. The opinion of the assessment in ER ... 17
B. Students’ feeling toward the assessment in ER...24
Conclusion ... 25
Acknowledgement ... 29
References ... 30
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STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD ASSESSMENT IN EXTENSIVE READING
Fitria Desy Pratiwi ABSTRACT
This is a study about students’ attitudes toward assessment in Extensive Reading
(ET102) class in English Language Education Program of Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga. Therefore, the finding of this study is the answer for this research question: What are the students’ attitudes toward assessment in extensive reading class? It was conducted by employing open ended questionnaire. The participants were 92 students of English Department who took Extensive Reading Course in semester 1 2014/2015. The data from the questionnaire was used to get further information about their attitudes toward assessment. The finding showed that there were positive responses for the two components being assessed in this study: their opinion toward the assessment (79 respondents out of 91 or 86.8% respondents had positive opinions) and their feeling of the assessment (49 respondents out of 92 or 53.2% had positive feeling). From the positive responses, it can be concluded that the participants had majority positive attitude toward the assessment in extensive reading class. Through the result of this study, it is expected that it can give benefit for the students to know necessary information about their attitudes toward assessment.
Keywords : Attitude, Assessment, Extensive Reading
INTRODUCTION
Great people all emphasized the importance of reading. Through reading, not only people can increase their knowledge, but also add experiences and open the windows of the world. This is particularly for students for they have goals to
master the subjects that they are learning. Reading is a duty for students. In short, to be successful students, they must be able to grasp information and knowledge
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single in study”. That is why reading is needed to reach all the knowledge and
increase the information to help students develop their ability.
Basically reading are divided into two, there are intensive reading and extensive reading. Intensive reading refers to the careful reading of shorter, more
difficult foreign language texts with the goal of completed and detailed understanding (Palmer, 1968 as cited in Powell, 2005) whereas extensive reading (ER) refers to an approach to reading pedagogy that encourages students to
engage in a large amount of reading for pleasure in order to gain a general understanding of what is read (Day & Bamford, 1998; Grabe, 2009;
Grabe&Stoller, 2011 as cited in Yamashita, 2004). Since the aim of one of the reading courses taught in English Language Education Program of Satya Wacana Christian University is similar to the second explanation above, it is called as the
Extensive Reading (ER). This course aims at increasing students’ interests toward reading in English trough pleasure reading while developing their skills in
understanding certain texts. Therefore, students are encouraged to read several great and fun books or texts and then assigned to do several projects to check their understanding.
Because there are students’ assignments in the ER course, there must be
assessment efforts as well. Assessing students’ performance is one of the most
significant skills any teacher must have. According Stiggins (1999) as cited in Al-nouh et al (2014) a teacher spends around thirty to fifty percent of classroom time assessing their students, which make teachers or educators and policy makers
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Assessment refers to “a process of inquiry that integrates multiple sources of
evidence, whether test-based or not, to support an interpretation, decision, or
action” (Moss, Girard, & Haniford, 2006 as cited in Al-nouh et al 2014).
Basically based on O’leary (2006) and Yang (2007) as cited in Al-nouh et al
(2014) there are two kinds of assessment: formative or alternative assessment and summative or traditional assessment. Since the assessment in ET102 classrooms does not use a test at all, it is called as the alternative assessment. Students are
only encouraged to do create some journals, portfolios, and projects such as puppet show to check their understanding of the reading texts.
Moreover, because students of the Extensive Reading class (ET102) are new students who have different background knowledge about reading, their attitudes toward the assessments in ER must also be different from one another. Reid
(2003) states that, “Attitudes are important to us because they cannot be neatly
separated from study”. Attitude is considered as a crucial factor that influences
language performance (Visser, 2008). Therefore, accomplishment in a target
language relies not only on intellectual capacity, but also on the learner’s attitudes
towards language learning. By taking Vissser’s statement above, it is clear that
learning language should also be approached by taking account on the students’
psychological phenomenon (their attitude) and social phenomenon (peer-to-peer
assessment, group discussions, role play, etc) rather than as a solely academic one
(their grade). By taking the statements above, it is important to know the students’
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performance and their interest to ER class, particularly to increase their fascination in reading activities.
Based on the discussion above, the writer did a research on Extensive Reading class with the research question: What are the students’ attitudes toward assessment in Extensive Reading class? Through the result of this study, it was
expected that it can give benefit for the students to know necessary information about their attitudes toward assessment in Extensive reading. Following this
study, students can build awareness on how their attitudes influence their success in a language teaching and learning process, especially in ER classroom. The most
things are it is expected that by knowing the students’ attitude toward assessment
in ER class, it will help lecturers in planning their instruction to suit their learners’ needs as well as to assess their performances more dependably, comprehensively,
and consistently.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Extensive reading
ER is not a new thing in second or foreign language teaching and learning. Based on Putri & Husada (2008) as cited in Kalengkongan (2012), ER was first
introduced by Palmer in 1917, which is meant as pleasance reading (Mikuleky, 1990). There are many definition of ER by different researchers, but all of them
are in similar ideas. Susser and Robb (1990) have defined ER as reading large quantities of material for whole understanding with the aim of getting pleasure from the texts since students choose the books they want to read and the books
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reading as silent independent and individual reading of self-selected materials according to both the interest and level of a language learner, where the focus is
on getting pleasure, information and achieving a general understanding of content rather than concentrating on outside details, such as grammatical or lexical points,
or specific facts” (pp. 22- 23). In accordance to the experts’ statements above,
Yamashita (2004) states that the aim of this kind of reading is gaining support and identification in the field of second language (L2) reading pedagogy. Moreover,
he claims that extensive reading is also called by other alternative terms such as
“pleasure reading, sustained silent reading, free voluntary reading or book flood”.
Thus, still according to Yamashita, ER means “reading in quantity and in order to
gain a general understanding of what is read”. In summary, it can be concluded
that ER is reading a lot of books as silent reading or pleasure reading activities
where the aims is to gain general understanding based on what is read.
Attitudes
Many studies have already been conducted in the field of language attitude, that attitude is one of the dominant factors for success in language learning, (Alhmali, 2007; Ghazali et al., 2009). Moreover Montano and Kasprzyk (2008)
also declare that,
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Based on the definitions above the importance of attitude is to measure how successful the learning language process is in teaching and learning settings.
Students with positive attitudes can be differentiated from those with negative attitudes by seeing how they value their outcomes resulted from certain
behaviors. For example, when a student believes that they cannot see the importance of reading a particular novel or story discussed in an ER class, they tend to have negative attitude. However, when another student thinks that he or
she gains useful information, new insights about life, and valuable experiences after reading a particular story in an ER class, then he or she will have positive
attitude. This also apply in the way students think about the assessment in ER classes. In addition, another expert, Kerlinger (1984), supports the statements by
saying that “attitude affects people to have a certain tendency toward things
around them such as environment, issues, and different kind of ideas. Attitude affects people’s emotion, motivation, and cognitive response toward certain
problems”. In other words, attitude is a particular inclination, idea, or opinion that
people have in resolving problems or considering certain matters. When, for example, a student has a positive attitude toward the assessment given in ER
classroom, he or she may feel happy to finish the assignment without many complains and do it willingly, heartily, and enthusiastically to get the best result.
This condition will be different if students have negative attitude.
Generally, according to Mager (1986) there are two types of attitude; positive attitude and negative attitude or the favorable and unfavorable ones. He
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stimulus. In the other word, when someone has unfavorable attitude he or she is backing away from the stimulus. This fact is an evidence that attitude has a great
influence to someone’s motivation to do something. In a classroom setting,
someone with positive attitude will have higher motivation or inner stimulus to
perform well. Therefore, discussing about attitude in the language teaching and learning is extremely needed.
Based on Mathewson (1994) as cited in Yamashita (2004), he mentions
three components of attitudes; affective, cognitive and behaviour.
a. Affective
Affective refers to “feeling or emotion”. Several theorists (e.g.
Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975 cited in Willey & Sons, 1998) declare that
responses measured by ‘semantic differential items’ for example
opinion of ‘good-bad’ or ‘favorable-unfavorable’ can also be
regarded as affective responses. Attitude can help the learners to convey whether they like or dislike with the objects or surrounding
situations. “It is approved that the inner feelings and emotions of
learners can influence their perspectives and their attitudes towards
the target language” (Choy S.C & Troudi .S, 2006).
b. Cognitive
When the affective aspect refers to the feeling, the cognitive aspect
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thing such as specific “person, idea, rational arguments, and
situation”. When people have certain thinking or beliefs, they have
certain responses such as positive or negative reaction toward it. In addition, this aspect of attitude also involves the beliefs of the
language learners about the knowledge that learners’ receive and
their understanding in the process of language learning. From this explanation according to Wiley & Sons (1998) about affective and
cognitive components, it is clear that feeling refers to emotion and thinking refers to rational.
c. Behavioral
The last component of attitude is behavioral response or according to Mathewson (1994) it is occasionally called as conactive. Behavioral
attitude is when someone has certain mind or belief, he or she will do real action or indicate certain thing or behave in a certain way
toward something. Additionally, it is also related to particular confidence as Visser et al (2004) confirms that if people are conviction and confident with their mind and belief toward certain
thing, it will be revealed through their behavior; such as a person regularly eats healthy food every day. This is showed the positive
side of the person’s belief that eats healthy food is important.
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cognitively, or behaviorally” to a particular unit in a particular way
toward anything whether the response is positive or negative.
However, this study does not cover the behavioral attitude, but only uses
two of attitude’s components, which are affective and cognitive attitude. Based on
Wiley & Sons (1998), Yamashita (2004) and some other recent studies, they simply focus on two major attitudes: cognitive and affective. Yamashita further explains that since people find difficulty in conducting the study about behavioral
attitude, it is not covered any longer, “especially those who conducted a research
in attitudes toward English as second or foreign language”.
Types of assessment
The meaning of assessment itself is declared by Puhl (1997) who says that it is the process of gathering and integrating information about learners from several
sources to help teacher understand the students and describe them (p. 3). Assessment also focuses on learning, teaching and results. It allows information
for improving learning and teaching. The information is used by the teacher to make changes in the learning environment, and is shared to students to assist them in developing their learning and study habits (Yoloye, 1984).
Based on O’leary (2006) and Yang (2007) cited in Al-Nouh et al (2014)
there are two kinds of assessment: alternative or formative assessment and
traditional or summative assessment. Traditional or summative assessment
“involves collecting information on student progress at specific points in time to
sum up what has been learned” (Yang, 2007; Irish National Teachers’
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assessment are selected-response items (e.g., multiple-choice), brief constructed-response (e.g., short answer questions), and also essay questions.
On the other hand, O’leary (2006) and Yang (2007) cited in Al-Nouh et al
(2014) states that alternative or formative assessment is collecting information on
normal basis and using it to increase teaching, learning, and student outcome. Alternatives to standardized assessment have been referred to in the literature in
many ways: “alternative assessment”, “informal assessment”, “authentic
assessment”, “performance assessment”, “descriptive assessment”, and “direct
assessment”. The kinds of alternative assessment are oral questioning, teacher
observation, student self and peer-assessment, role-plays, oral presentations, portfolios, story of text retelling, cloze tests, and performance-based assessments (O’leary, 2006; Yang, 2007 as stated in Al-Nouh et al (2014). By using this kind
of assessment, students are allowed to “get involved in their own evaluation,
understand how to evaluate themselves, take responsibility for their own
development, and self-direct some of their own learning” Beckman and Klinghammer (2006) as cited in Hamayan (1995). This thing is important since learners are also given the chances to evaluate and asses their progresses during
their enrolment in a particular class. Moreover according to Valencia & Pearson (1994) Alternative assessment consists of all of those efforts that do not remain to
the “traditional criteria of standardization, cost effectiveness, objectivity and
machine-scorability”.
In summary these are the differences of traditional and alternative
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exams”, “timed, multiple-choice format”, “decontextualized test items”, “score
suffice for feedback”, “norm-referenced scores”, “focus on the ‘right’ answer”,
“summative” , “oriented to product”, “non-interactive performance” , and “ foster
extrinsic motivation ”. On the other hand, Brown points that alternative
assessment is “continuous long-term assessment”, “untimed, free-response
format”, “contextualized communicative tasks”, “individualized feedback and
wash back”, “criterion-reference scores”, “open-ended, creative answers”,
“formative”, “oriented to process”, “interactive performance”.
There are some the advantages of using the alternative assessments in ER,
which one of them is measuring higher-order thinking skills. Since this type of assessment tool focuses on the development and the performance of the students, they have the chance to demonstrate what they learned. That is, if a learner fails to
perform a given task at a particular time, they still have the opportunity to demonstrate their ability at a different time and situation. According to Law and
Eckes (1995) as stated in Dikli (2003) the teacher has opportunity to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the student in a variety of areas and situations since alternative assessment is developed in context and over time.
Moreover, alternative assessment provides us with an insight into individual
students’ language proficiency that cannot be obtained from standardized tests.
The information obtained from alternative assessment is extensive and reflects wide range of language abilities and skills in a variety of context (Graves and Sunstein 1992, Hamp-Lyons 1992 as cited in Hamayan 1995). Therefore through
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higher-order thinking skills and so that it provides insight on individual student’s language proficiency.
In addition, there are major evidences that support the use of alternative assessment in the context of learning. As Reeves (2000) as cited in Dikli (2003)
believes that the emphasis on performance assessment is the skill that learners should have so that they can apply their comprehension and skills to real life simulations. He further states that there are five main points in performance
assessment; “1. It is focused on complex learning, 2. It engages higher-order
thinking and problem solving skills, 3. It stimulates a wide range of active
responses, 4. It involves challenging tasks that require multiple steps, and 5. It
requires significant commitments of student time and effort.”
In the same way, Simonson and et. al. (2000) as cited in Dikli (2003), talks
about some advantages of alternative assessment. First, alternative assessment tends to simulate real-life contexts. Learners have opportunity to practice the
authentic activities that they might meet in real life. These activities allow them to transmit their skills to diverse real world related settings. Second, collaborative works is encouraged. This collaborative works enable the students to create group
discussions, peers consultations, and other forms of collaboration so that students can exchange and widen their knowledge about particular things. Finally, based
on Winking (1997) as stated in Dikli (2003), alternative assessments give instructors to have a better understanding of student learning. By this mean, both students and lecturers can figure out particular learning styles that each of the
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students’ results rather than scores can allow instructor to get further insights
concerning students’ skill and knowledge. This idea will make the lecturers
recognize the students’ potentials, including the way they work, think and analyze
certain problems related to the tasks.
In addition, authentic assessment tools, such as portfolios, independent projects, journals and so on, allow learners express their knowledge on the material in their own ways using various intelligences (Brualdi, 1996) like what
Gardner as cited in Online document (1996) addresses such as 1.logical mathematical intelligence, 2.linguistic intelligence, 3. spatial intelligence,
4.musical intelligence, 5.bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, 6.the personal intelligences: a. interpersonal intelligence, b.intrapersonal intelligence, and 7. naturalistic intelligence”. When we relate the 7 intelligence and the alternative
assessments in ER course, not only the students use their linguistic intelligence, but also incorporate other specific intelligences that they have in dealing with the
reading-related projects or portfolios. Looking at those advantages and seeing what is applied in the English Department, it is apparent that the alternative
assessments lead to the improvement of students’ skills, especially in reading and
its related assignments.
However, In spite of these advantages of alternative assessment, it is not without disadvantages. As Law and Eckes (1995) as stated in Dikli (2003)
mentioned that alternative assessments can be tough in terms of time and energy spent by the teacher. For example, the big amount of portfolio products, “which
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teacher in terms of practicality” (Bailey, 1998). As Simonson and et. al. (2000)
said teacher might find it harder to score and spend more time to evaluate the
learner’s performance. This statement is in coherence with Rentz (1997) as stated
in Dikli (2003) who also supported the claims that unlike multiple-choice tests,
which are practical to score, performance assessments are viewed quite time consuming to grade.
Furthermore, assessing learners using alternative assessments are not
without problems. In fact, alternative assessment may have many of the same flaws cited for multiple-choice tests. Critics, such as Mehrens (1992), argued that
inadequately designed alternative assessments would make the assessment process
subjective, which was based on the teachers’ opinion, so it made teaching learning
processes unpleasant to learners. This is especially for students who could not
deliver their messages clearly in their alternative assessment projects.
Additionally, alternative assessments “have practical problems, including high
cost, administrative complexity, low technical quality, and questionable legal
defensibility” (Mehrens, 1992). These flaws are of greatest concerns when
assessments are used asses students’ works which at the end become a foundation
to determine students’ grade or achievements in the class.
THE STUDY
Context of the study
This study is conducted in English Language Education Program of Satya Wacana Christian University. This University is located on Jl. Diponegoro
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of Satya Wacana Christian University because it is more efficient and achievable or easy to be reached.
Description of the course
One of the reading courses in English Language Education Program of Satya
Wacana Christian University is ER. This study is conducted in ER classes of semester 1 in 2014/2015. This course takes about 5 credits and is held every Tuesday at 9 am until 12 am, Thursday at 07 am until 9 am. This course is aimed
at increasing students’ interests toward reading in English. The students will be
required to read large amounts of longer, easy-to-understand material in and
outside the classroom at their own pace and level. They will read for overall understanding rather than detailed analysis.
Moreover, to prepare the students to become the future English teachers, this
course provides opportunities for them to experience teachers as a reading model. The class meetings will be used to share and discuss what the students have read.
It is expected that a community of readers can be developed. Homework will be given and students will be tested on their understanding and appreciation of the texts at the end of the semester.
Participants
The participants of this study are 92 participants who took Extensive
16 Instrument of data collection
This research used qualitative data. An open ended questionnaire is
distributed to collect the data. This research used a questionnaire to get further information about their attitudes toward assessment in ER. The questionnaire had
5 statements. In this research there are only 2 components of attitudes that are used: affective and cognitive, without covering the behavioral attitude. Then, from the 5 statements, the writer groups it into the 2 attitudes component; affective and
cognitive.
Data collection procedure
First, the writer started piloting questionnaires by choosing 5 students out of 132 students from all of the Extensive Reading classes in semester 1 2014/2015. Before distributing the questionnaires, the writer gave an initial explanation on
what assessment is. After piloting the questionnaires, the writer revised the questionnaires. Only 92 questionnaires were returned. This made it possible to
collect adequate information and opinions from the respondents within a short period of time.
Data analysis procedure
The data is qualitative. To specify, the writer analyzed the statement from questionnaires one by one. For each or several statements, the writer grouped
them into several more concrete headings. The writer used all the reasoning information gathered from the questionnaires to explain the reason behind certain attitude related to the statements. From several statements that the writer has
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the end, the entire attitude was combined to make a broad generalization of the
students’ attitude toward assessment in extensive reading class.
Discussion
The report in this section is the description of interpretation and analysis based on the data from 92 participants who have returned the questionnaire. The data gathered is an open ended questionnaire from the participants. It can be
subdivided in two parts, the first one is the opinion of assessment in ER and the second one is about students’ feeling of the assessment in ER.
A. Opinion of the assessment in ER
The first discussion is the analysis of opinion about assessment. The total of participants who answer this statement is only 91 out of 92 (98.9%). In the part of
opinion of assessment, there are positive and negative responds from participants.
The first one, there are some positive statements from participants. Most of
the participants said that assessments in ER are good because they can do them easily (79 respondents out of 91 or 86.8%). In addition they said that the assessment is a good practice because the continuously given assessments make
them focus in the lesson. Also, they tend to encourage the students to learn and read more books. These are some statements from participants.
Student 5: “I think the assessment is a good method to grade students because it is not only assessing the final result, but also the learning process”.
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Student 8: It is good because we are forced to learn and try more.
Those statements are support by Frazier and Paulson (1992), Levi (1990),
Mc Grail and Purdom (1992), McGrail and Schwartz (1993), Valencia (1990) as stated in Hamayan (1995) who says that through alternative assessment, it is possible to focus on the process as well as the result of learning. Hence,
participants can feel that assessment is not just assessing the final result, but also the learning process.
their vocabulary is also increasing. This assessment is useful for them. Because of that reasons, students can understand the reading content and do the task easily. Here are some statements from the participants.
Student 23: “Theassessment it’s really useful, because we can improve our skills as well”.
Student 7: “Yes, it was. My skill is improved so fast and I can jump from level 4 to level 6 and the speed is so challenging, I can read as fast as possible”.
Student 65: “Yes, before I enrolled myself to this class, my reading speed is low, then when I joined this class my reading speed is improved”.
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Student 84: “The standard of the completing task is really improving my skill”.
Those statements from the questionnaires is in accordance to Tierney, Carter
and Desai (1991) as cited in Hamayan’s (1995) claim that alternative assessment
attempts to capture the learners’ total array of skill and abilities. Through
alternative assessment procedures, it is possible to measure students’ language
proficiency in the context of specific subject matter (Hill and Ruptic 1994, Short1993, Turner 1992 as cited in Hamayan (1995). Then it also supports the
previous theory by Beckman and klinghammer (2006) as cited in Hamayan (1995) that learners can get involved in their own evaluation. It is showed from the
statements above that the students are able to know what they have to do and how they can attain good scores to fulfill the criteria of the lecturers.
Furthermore, some participants said that the assignments and assessments in
ER are fun and interesting. They enjoyed drama performance as one of the activities in the Extensive Reading class. They also feel comfortable to do the
assessments because they are enjoying the assignments. These are some statements from the participants.
Student 15: “The assessment is a bit fun and makes me like reading more”. Student 34: “I enjoy almost everything in that class, especially when I did the project, for example drama performance ...”
The students’ responses above show that alternative assessment brings less
pressure to them. In contrast to traditional assessment, alternative assessments bring more enjoyable learning processes. Based on what AL-Muttawa & Kailani
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the process of evaluation has been misused by the majority of EFL instructors since they used monthly or regular tests such as selected responses test
(multiple-choice, matching and true -false) which are the preferred techniques for instructors for measuring their students performances. Furthermore, they also
tended to stress the discrete features of language not the overall language
proficiency. By using the alternative assessment technique, students’ overall
language proficiency can be addressed maximally by asking them to truly
understand the texts being read.
Additionally, few participants said that the assessments in ER are something
that they should do. This may from participants’ perceptions that as students, they
should do the assignment as their duty no matter whether they like it or not. Then, only some participants said that from the assessments, they can learn about
reading. In this case, they feel the challenge to read more books, which is unquestionable because the aims of Extensive Reading class is indeed to increase
students’ interests toward reading in English.
Despite all of the positive responds from the participants toward assessment in ER, certainly there are also some minor negative responds (9 students out of 91 or 9.89%). They said that the assessments in ER made them tired, bored and
stressed as they must do a lot of assignment and are forced to read more books. Here are some statements from the participants.
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Student 43:”It was so boring for me, make me feel stressful. I should read every day and make the reflection. It was boring!”
Then, some of them also felt that they need more time to do the assignment.
It is because the assignment takes so much time to do, while they still have other assignments from other subjects to finish. Participants also said that the assessment in ER is not an important assessment. They felt that the assessment in
ER is too difficult for them merely because of the number of assessment they have
to finish in a regular basis. These are a few statements from the participants.
Student 25 : “It takes so much of my time. I have less time to relax or do other things such as my hobbies because I have to focus on finishing it”. Student 28: “It makes me stressed up. I spend much time to do it”.
Furthermore, few participants gave negative responds in the way teachers give recognizable standards or criteria for student in completing the given tasks.
Participants think that everyone has their own standard, so teachers cannot give the same standards for all students. Also they also think that there should not be
such criteria when they are working with their creativities. Those students’
opinions is similar to what Xu (2005) says that there is vagueness and unclear standards in several subject areas including the assessment process that
complicate the grading system because there are no concrete standards defining what students should know and be able to do.
Among the few negative responses, there were some who stated their
negative attitudes but at the same time acknowledged the usefulness of ER assessments to improve their English skills (3 students out of 91 or 3.29%). Here
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Student 77: “Sometime it makes me bored, but it can make our skill better”. Student 19: “Sometime it makes me bored. But it helps me to improve my reading skill”.
Student 66: “For me, it is not too fun and tiring, but it is useful”.
Besides the opinion of assessments in ER, participants also mentioned about
advantages and disadvantages of the assessment in ER. The first one is advantages of the assessment in ER. Most of participants said that the assessment in ER could
improve their reading skill. They could learn more about reading skill such as; increase their vocabulary, have more experience and increase the knowledge by reading many books, increase their interests to read books, and understand more
about stories in English. They also said they could practice to retell the story, spend time to read books, and enjoy to read books. Moreover, participants added
that they could practice more about writing so that they also improved their grammar skill by writing summaries of the texts. Not only about writing skill,
their speaking skills also increase. They declared that their speaking improves as became more fluent in English. Their pronunciation improves as well because they had to practice to retell the stories in front of the class. In addition, their time
management was improving so that they had more time to relax.
Those opinions are strengthened by Hayaman (1995) who states that alternative assessment procedures are based on the notion that the
inter-relationship among various aspects of language, such as phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, cannot be ignored. Also, the four skills of language –listening,
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Through this assessment the students are allowed to learn various aspects of
language and also the four skill of language.
Many of the participant also said that the assessment in ER was a helpful assessment. Participants mentioned that the assessment in ER made them read more books, became more focus and work harder because ER assessment,
students had to be discipline to follow the deadlines. Not only that, from the teacher standardized criteria, participants admitted that they knew their
weaknesses easily and learnt to be good. Therefore, they could measure their expected grade easily. Participants admitted to enjoy doing a lot of assignments. It
also helped them to understand the activities in extensive reading easily, because there is no test in the end of semester and less homework to do. The statements from the participants above are supported by Beckman and klinghammer (2006)
as cited in Hamayan (1995) which states that alternative assessment trains learners to measure their own learning progress and to identify their own strength and
weaknesses.
Some participants mentioned that the assessment in ER increased their work performances by individual and group. Several participants said the benefit of
group work was is they can add friends. They also said that they got better understanding by actively involved in group works. In addition, individual
assessment was claimed to increase their confidence and creativity.
The second one is disadvantages of alternative assessments. Many of participants said that it takes so much time to do assignment. The reason was
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too many books, so they did not get the content of the books well. They become
busy and think too hard to do the assignment.
Few of participants admitted to feel bored and tired of reading lots of books. They become lazy and annoyed because the assignments were done continuously. It makes them felt sleepy during class, became dizzy, and felt
stressed because they were forced to read lots of books. Moreover, because of the criteria of the assessment was high, few of them said that the grade was not in line
with their expectation. So they felt very confused.
B. Students’ feeling toward the assessment in ER
The second discussion is the analysis of what the students feel about assessment in ER. The total of participants who answer this statement is 92 participants (100% responses). In this part, there are also positive and negative
responds from the participants.
The first one is about the positive statements from the participants. There
were 49 out of 92 students who expressed positive feeling (53.2%). Most of them felt that assessment in ER could improve their reading skill because by reading
many books, they could remember the many vocabularies as well.
Some of them felt that the assessment in ER was fun and challenging. It is because they felt that the assessment in ER was really helpful, useful, and
suitable. They could improve their capability through the assessment in ER. The most important thing was the participants had increased interests toward the
25
The statement above is supported by Beckman and Klinghammer (2006) who say that alternative assessment inspires creativity to the students as it
involves multi-stage tasks and real problems that require creative use of language rather than simple repetition. That is why participants become interested and
creative to do the assignment.
Despite of all the positive statements, there are also negative statements from the participants. 39 out of 92 students presented negative feeling (42.3%).
Some of participants admitted that they felt bored and tired to do the assignment for it was a waste of time. It was because they had to do many assignments so that
they made them felt burdensome, annoyed and busy. A few of participants admitted that they also felt that they did not give the best to do the assignment as
their grades or scores were not satisfying.
In addition, a number of participants assumed that they had negative feeling but they also admitted that the assessment in ER was also helpful for them. 4 out
of 92 students agreed that they expressed both negative and positive feeling toward assessment in ER class (4.34%). A few of them felt interested but at the same time bored of the assessment in ER.
Conclusion
This study aims to find out the students’ attitudes toward assessment in
extensive reading class. The results of the study indicated that the participants had majority positive attitude eventhough there were still negative attitudes toward
26
responses toward the two attitude components, affective and cognitive, were majority positive. In terms of students opinion, 86.8% respondents had positive
opinions, 9.89% respondents had negative opinions, whereas 3.29% respondents presented both negative and positive opinion toward the assessments in ER
classroom. In addition, in terms of students feeling, 53.2% had positive feeling, 42.3% had negative feeling, and 4.34% had both positive and negative feeling
toward the assessment hold in ER class.
When asked about the advantages and the disadvantages of the assessment in the ER course, majority of the students claimed that they experienced more
advantages in the way that their reading skill improved and their overall language ability, including grammar and vocabulary, writing, and even speaking also improved. They said that the assessment had helped them to read more, have more
interest to read and write, and enjoy the language learning process in general. However, minority of the students also said some disadvantages related to the
assessments in ER class, including boredom as they were forced to read many books, stressful feeling as they needed to do the assignments continuously, and dissatisfaction for their marks did not meet their expectation as they thought that
the assessment criteria was too high.
Furthermore, these finding can give benefit for the participants to know
necessary information about their attitudes toward assessment especially in Extensive Reading. Because attitude is considered as one of crucial factor influencing language performance (Visser, 2008), students can identify that their
27
the course. Therefore, by knowing students’ attitude assessment in ER class it was
expected can influences the students’ performance and their interest to ER class,
particularly to increase their fascination in reading activities. This study can also helps the lecturers in planning their instruction to suit their learners’ needs, to
assess the performance of the students more dependably, comprehensively, and consistently, as well as to influence the students’ interests in reading by improving and considering the quality of reading materials and exercises derived from the
students’ needs. In addition, assessment in ER is not only a learning process but
also a good way to reveal the development of student’s talents, skills, knowledge,
and also feelings.
However, further study can be conducted considering that this study has some limitations. The first is the result of study can be different, which highly
depends on the comprehension of students. Furthermore, the scope of this study is specified only from the aspect of Extensive Reading class. However, there is no
way that this research could be generalized into different contexts or field of studies. Therefore, for further study, it is important to do observation and
interview to get more information and better result related to the students’ attitude
of assessment in ER. In addition, this study also recommend for further research to include the ways to help students to improve their attitude in order to give
solution to students with negative attitude. Also, in the future study, it is also
advisable to relate the students’ attitude and the students’ final performance or
marks to strengthen the idea that attitude has a strong influence toward students’
28
above in the future studies, it is expected that all the necessary components related
29
Acknowledgement
For the first one, I wish to express my love and gratitude to Allah SWT for
His blessings given to me so that I could accomplish this Thesis. I also would like to say my biggest appreciation and thankfulness to my lovely family, my mother, father and sister. Thank you so much for your love, prayer and support all this
time. Also, my deepest gratitude goes to Ms. Rindang Widiningrum, M.Hum, my supervisor, for her willingness and patience in guiding me all this time. Also, to
Ms. Anita Kurniawati, M.Hum, my examiner, for dedicating her time reading my paper and making important corrections; I do thank her a lot. In addition, I would
also like to say thank you for the lecturers in English Department, especially the ER teachers for helping me in conducting this research and all of the Fourteeners in the ER classrooms who have helped me to fill my questionnaire. The last, I
would also like to convey my special thanks to ‘geng’ Pumpkin and Antok , ‘nik’
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33 APPENDIX
QUESTIONNAIRE
Dear friends,
I am interested conducting research about the students’ attitudes toward assessment in Extensive Reading Class. The aim is not to evaluate your personal
participation. Please kindly fulfill the questionnaire below. Thank you for taking the time to answer the questions thoughtfully.
1. What is your opinion toward assessment in Extensive reading in general? Explain your answer!
...
2. Do you think your reading skill in term of level and speed has been improved in extensive reading class? Specify your answer!
... 3. Teacher give recognize standards or criteria for student in completing task
given.
__ Strongly agree
__ Agree
__ Strongly disagree __ Disagree
Why?
34
4. How do you feel about the use of assessment in Extensive reading class? Explain your answer!
... ...
5. What do you think about the advantages and disadvantages of assessment especially in Extensive reading class?
a. Advantages:
-... - ...
- ...
b. Disadvantages:
- ... - ...
- ...
