The Correlation Study between Students’ Grammar Mastery and Their Reading Ability at Eighth Grade Students’ of State Junior High School 12 Purworejo in Academic 2012/2013

Abstract

The final project is about the correlation study between students’ grammar mastery and their reading ability at eighth grade students in junior high school 12 Purworejo in the academic year 2012/2013. The objectives of the study are to find out the students’ grammar mastery and students’ ability in reading and also to find out whether or not there is a correlation between the students’ grammar mastery and their reading ability of eighth grade in State junior high School 12 Purworejo. This research is survey research and the population of this research is the eighth grade students in junior high school 12 Purworejo in the academic year 2012/2013. The sampling process was administered by applying a purposive sampling technique. There were 192 students of the eighth grade and I took 64 students as the sample. I administered two kinds of tests, namely Grammar Test and Reading Test. Both of the tests were in written form. In Grammar and Reading Test, I used Multiple Choice test. The instrument used for measuring the achievement was a test. The result of this research showed that the mean score of students’ grammar mastery is 37.68. It means that the students’ on mastery grammar is very bad category. Then, the mean score of students’ reading ability is 53.75. It means that the students’ on reading ability is in bad category. So, this research shows that there is no significant correlation between the students’ grammar mastery and their reading. This result is obtained from the computation of the correlation between the students’ grammar mastery and their reading applied to the sample is -0.119. The critical value of the Pearson r with the 5 % significant level is 0.317. It means that the result obtained from the computation is lower than its critical value. Therefore, I conclude that the correlation between the two variables above is not significant. In line with the result of the research, I suggest that to improve the students’ reading ability, the students should improve their grammar mastery, because the grammar mastery can support their reading ability. It is essential to the teacher to know that one of the factors affect the students reading ability is the students’ mastery on grammar.