Abstract:
The objectives of the study are to identify students‟ understanding in parts of speech, to describe students‟ reading comprehension ability, and to find out whether or not there is a positive and significant correlation between their understanding parts of speech and reading comprehension ability.
This research is quantitative research. The researcher took class B,C,D, and E, which the total number of students is 105 students, from six classes at the eighth grade students of SMP N 31 Purworejo in the academic year of 2015/2016. The research used a multiple choice test as instrument; the researcher got the data using understanding parts of speech test and reading comprehension test. To test the hypothesis, the researcher used Pearson's Product-Moment coefficient of correlation. Then, the data was calculated both manually and by using SPSS version 16.
Based on the computation, the researcher found three things. First, the mean of understanding parts of speech was 58.76, and it was categorized as sufficient. Second, the mean of reading comprehension test was 65.71, and it was categorized as good. Third, there is a positive and significant correlation between students‟ understanding in parts of speech and their reading comprehension ability as the test score was 0.502. From the calculation, the researcher got the rvalue is higher than rtable (0.502 > 0.192). It indicates that Ho is rejected and Ha is accepted. The correlation value was categorized as a moderate correlation.
