THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN COMPREHENDING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT AND THEIR ENGLISH ACHIEVEMENT AT THE SEVENTH GRADE STUDENT OF SMPN 31 PURWOREJO IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2012/2013

Abstract

Reading is one of the four language skills that should be taught and learned by senior high school students. Reading is taught from elementary school to university by using many kinds of method applied by English teacher. The skill of reading is regarded as the backbone of other language skills such as writing and speaking and improve the language component as well,for instance vocab and grammar. Descriptive text is a text which says what a person or a thing looks like. Its purpose is to describe and reveal a particular person, place, or thing. Descriptive text has the structures : First, identification : identifying the phenomenon to be described. Second, description : describing the phenomenon in parts, qualities, or/and characteristics. Third, the Language Feature of descriptive text are :using attributive and identifying process, using adjective and classifiers in nominal group, using simple present tense . The objective of this research is to identify the students ability in comprehending descriptive text and to discuss the corelation between students ability in comprehending descriptive text and their English achievement.This research is an experimental research which has conducted on the seventh grade students of SMPN 31 Purworejo in the academic year 2012/2013. In this research, the researcher took 32 students as the sample .Then, the researcher gave a descriptive test. The test is doing multiple choice test about descriptive text. Statistically, the researcher analyzed the data by using t-test separated variance. The result of this research shows that the coefficient correlation (r) equals to 0.120, it means that there is significant correlation between the students’ ability in comprehending descriptive text and their English acheivement. It also indicates that the students’ ability in comprehending descriptive text influences their English achievement. The correlation between students’ ability in comprehending descriptive text and their English achievement is fair poor.