A Correlation between Students’ Mastery on Simple Past Tense and Vocabulary Mastery toward Their Ability to Write a Narrative Paragraph of Third Year Students of English Department of Bung Hatta University

Abstrak

Writing is one of the English skills that is very important to be mastered by the students. It is important since writing skill plays an important role in most context of life. According to Dumais (in Fitri 2013 : 74 ), writing in English meant to fill the gap that exist between the ability to express idea, feeling, opinions and taught and the ability to express the same things in written form in English.

Type of this research is correlational study. This research aimed at finding out whether there is a significant correlation between students’ mastery on simple past tense and vocabulary mastery toward their ability to write a narrative paragraph of the third year students of English Department of Bung Hatta University or not. The hyphothesis of this research was there is a significant correlation between students’ mastery on simple past tense and vocabulary mastery toward their ability to write a narrative paragraph of third year students of English Department of Bung Hatta University. The number of population in this research was eightteen (18) students, ten (10) students for try out test. There was distributed into one class. The researcher took one class as sample by using total sampling technique. The researcher gathered the data by using grammar test, vocabulary test and writing test. To analyze the data, the researcher used the Pearson Product Moment Formula and Multiple Correlation Formula.  

After analyzing the data, the researcher found that r counted (0.18) was less than r table (0.4000) at significant level α 0.05 and degree of freedom n-2 . It means that there was no significant correlation. Then, the researcher found that r counted (0.41) was bigger than r counted (0.4000) at significant level α 0.05 and degree of freedom n-2. It means that there is a significant correlation . Last, the value of coefficient correlation of three variables, the researcher found that r counted (0.54) and f counted (3.08) at significant level α 0.05and the degree of freedom (df) n-k-1 (18), value of table was 3.68. It means that f counted (3.08) was less than than f table (3.68). Therefore, the relationship between three variables was no significant. It means that hyphothesis stating “there is no significant correlation between students’ mastery on simple past tense and vocabulary mastery toward their ability to write a narrative paragraph of the third year students of English Department of Bung Hatta University is rejected.

In conclusion, students’ simple past tense mastery and vocabulary mastery are still low. It means that if students’ mastery on simple past tense and vocabulary mastery increase, their writing ability do not increase.Therefore, the students are suggested to improve their vocabulary mastery and enhance their grammar mastery and do more exercise in writing a paragraph. 

Keywords : simple past tense mastery, vocabulary mastery, writing ability.