ABSTRACT
The final project is about a correlation study between students’ mastery of past tense and their ability in expressing their past activities in writing, a case study of eleventh grade students of SMA I Kudus in the academic year of 2006/2007.
The objectives of the study are to find out the students mastery of past tense and the students abilities in expressing past activities in writing, and also to find out whether or not there is a correlation between the students mastery of past tense and their abilities in expressing past activities in writing.
This study is a case study and the population of this study is the eleventh grade students of SMA I Kudus in the academic year of 2006/2007. The sampling process was administered by applying a purposive sampling technique. There were 400 students of the eleventh grade and I took 40 students as the sample. I administered two kinds of tests, namely Grammar Test and Writing Test.
Both of the tests were in written form. In Grammar Test, I used Multiple Choice test, while in writing test, I emphasized students to retell their past activities into a good writing construction. The instrument used for measuring the achievement was a test. Before the instrument was used, it had been tried out first. The main purpose of conducting it was to find out the validity, reliability, discrimination items and level of difficulties of the item of past tense in a multiple choice test. I then selected the items before they were used as the instrument of this research.
The result of this research showed that there is a significant correlation between the students’ mastery of past tense and their ability in expressing past activities in writing. This result is obtained from the computation of the correlation between the students’ mastery of past tense and their ability in expressing past activities in writing applied to the sample is 0.8107. The critical value of the Pearson r with the 5 % significant level is 0.312. It means that the result obtained from the computation is greater than its critical value. Therefore, I conclude that the correlation between the two variables above is significant.
In line with the result of the research, I suggest that to improve the students’ ability in expressing past activities in writing, students should improve their mastery of past tense, because the mastery of past tense can support their ability in expressing past activities in writing. It is essential to the teacher to know that one of the factors affect the students ability in expressing past activities especially in writing is the students’ mastery of past tense.
