THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CLASS 8D STUDENTS’ GRAMMAR ACHIEVEMENT AND THEIR WRITING ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 1 KENCONG IN THE 2010 / 2011 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

English is as a foreign language in Indonesia. This language has been taught from elementary school up to university level. It is one of compulsory subjects in junior high school. In learning English students should be able to produce English both in written and spoken forms. In written form, the students should be able to write any kind of texts. One of them is recount text. There are some aspects that influence the students’ writing. They are grammar, vocabulary, organization and mechanic. Grammar is important in writing. It is the key to lead the students to produce good English especially in writing. This research was conducted to find the correlation between class 8D students’ grammar achievement and their writing achievement at SMPN 1 Kencong in the 2010/2011 academic year. The respondents of this research were the students of class 8D at SMPN 1 Kencong in the 2010/2011 academic year. The research respondents were determined by using purposive method. The total number of respondents was 39 students. The primary data on this research were collected from the students’ score of grammar achievement test and writing achievement test, while the secondary data were gained through interview and documentation. The students’ grammar achievement score were collected by doing the multiple choice test which covered simple past tense, past continuous tense, degrees of comparison, articles and personal pronoun. Furthermore, the students’ writing achievement score were collected by doing the writing achievement test that asked the respondents to write a paragraph of personal recount text. The aspect to evaluate the students’ writ ing was focused on grammar only. The result of the primary data was analyzed by Product Moment Correlation. Based on the calculation, the r-statistic was 0.811, while rtable for 39 respondents with significant level of 5% shows 0.316. It means that rstatistic was higher than r-table (0.811>0.316). Therefore, the null hypothesis (H ) which was formulated as “there is no significant correlation between class 8D students’ grammar achievement and their writing achievement at SMPN 1 Kencong in the 2010/2011 academic year” was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (Ha) which was formulated as “there is significant correlat ion between class 8D students’ grammar achievement and their writing achievement at SMPN 1 Kencong in the 2010/2011 academic year” was accepted. It means that there is a posit ive correlat ion between class 8D students’ grammar achievement and their writing achievement at SMPN 1 Kencong in the 2010/2011 academic year. By mastering grammar, it is very useful for the students to produce language correctly especially to make a good writing.