The Correlation between Students’ Grammar Ability and Motivation toward Students’ Descriptive Writing Ability of the Second Year at English Department of Bung Hatta University

Abstrak

Davoudi et al. (2015) state that writing skill is seen as a difficult skill to acquire. It was concerned primarily with formal patterns in the language itself. Writing is one of the hardest parts to learn the English language because we have to put the ideas into written text in a complex process. That complex process in writing has to consider important aspects; content, vocabulary, language use (grammar), organization, and mechanics (Ahmadian & Hosseini, 2012). Grammar is one of the important aspects to make good writing especially writing a descriptive paragraph. As stated by Nurdianingsih & Purnama (2017), The organization of paragraph always needs the proper grammar. Morenberg in Putri et al. (2016) defines grammar as a sequence process in managing words to become meaningful sentences. In addition, The ability to make good writing and to improve students’ writing ability is influenced by another factor that is motivation. As stated by Ozturk (2014), motivation is the key point in the success of the learning process. Relating to this, the researcher conducted this study on the purpose of determining the correlation between students’ grammar ability and motivation toward students’ descriptive writing ability. 

The population of this research was 23 students in the second year at the English Department of Bung Hatta University. To this study, researcher used the total sampling technique. The number of samples was 23 students. The researcher collected the data by using a grammar test, a motivation questionnaire, and a descriptive writing test. To make the instrument reliable, the instrument gave try out a grammar test and motivation questionnaire. The result of the try out showed that the reliability of the grammar test try out was 0.73 or high correlation (see appendix 4) and the reliability of the motivation questionnaire was 0.87 (see appendix 11). Both of the instruments were reliable and could be used to collect data from this research.

The results of data analysis showed that the students’ grammar ability was moderate (86.96%), their motivation was moderate (73.91%), and their descriptive writing ability was moderate as well (82.61%). There is a significant correlation between grammar ability and students’ descriptive writing ability and the value of coefficient correlation was 0.89 or very high correlation. There is a significant correlation between motivation and students’ descriptive writing ability and the coefficient correlation was 0.77 or high correlation. There is a significant correlation between grammar ability and motivation toward students’ descriptive writing ability. It showed that f counted was higher that f table (38.09 > 3.49).

Based on the findings, this study concluded that there was a significant correlation between students’ grammar ability and their motivation to their descriptive writing ability indicating specific to the second year at the English department of Bung Hatta University. Then, this study suggests to better implement teaching strategies, so that students’ grammatical ability, motivation, and their writing ability improve.

 Keyword: Descriptive writing ability, grammar ability, motivation.