An experimental study On the effect of homework On student's mastery of English grammar

As we know, the time allocated for studying English in class is very limited. So it is not possible to master all the study skills in English consisting of listening, reading, writing, and speaking only by practising English in class. Students also have to practise English more outside the class. That is why the writer would like to write a thesis entitled "An Experimental study on the effect of homework on students' mastery of English grammar". Homework is administered to have a possibility to increase students' mastery in English grammar since grammar is an important base to form a language. Hence, bv the increase on students' mastery of English grammar, students will be able to master the English study skills more easily, either listening, reading, writing, or speaking. The objective of this study is aimed at detecting whether there is the effect of homework on students' mastery of English grammar. For the purpose of this study, the writer has taken all the second year students of SMP Katolik Santa Agnes, at jalan Mendut 7, Surabaya, 1987-1988. Five classes are available for all the second year students of Junior High School in that school. The writer has been given two classes out of the five classes as the sample of this study, in which one class is treated as the experimental group while the other one is treated as the control one. In trying to detect the effect of homework on students' mastery of English grammar, the writer has used some written tests related to the lesson that has been explained in the class. The written tests are provided to both sample classes, the experimental class and the control class, with the same test items. Those written tests consist of a pretest, formative tests, and a posttest. The research design used is a Pretest-Posttest non equivalent control group Quasi Experimental Design. This design does not have randomly assigned treatment, but the comparisons between treatment and non treatment conditions are always be made with non equivalent groups. This design also includes the same pretest and posttest that must be presented to both the treatment and non treatment groups in order to compare students' English progress given homework and the one that is not given any homework. The different results of tests between the experimental and control groups will indicate whether the application of homework as the special treatment is significant or not. In this case, t-test is used to find out whether or not the difference between the experimental and control groups is significant