THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENT ABILITY IN USING SIMPLE PAST TENSE AND IN THEIR RECOUNT TEXT RECOGNITION AT THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP N 2 MIRIT KEBUMEN IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2012/2013

Abstract

As a foreign language, English is not easy language to be learnt. English has four important skills to be mastered. To master the four skills, we have to master the grammar as the basic. Based on the statement above, the objective of this study is to find out the correlation between the students ability in using past tense and in their recount text recognition at the eighth grade students of SMP N 2 Mirit, Kebumen in the academic year of 2012/2013. The type of this research is descriptive quantitative research. The number of the population in this research is 192 students. The number of the sample is 32 students. The instrument that used to collect the data is a test. There were 35 questions to be tested. The data was analyzed by using descriptive analysis and inferential statistic.The research data were analyzed by using product moment Pearson. The results of this research are as follows, the average score of the student’s ability in using past is 65. The average score of the student’s recount text recognition is 76.87. The result of correlation from the formula was 0.159.It shows that the correlation between the studentsability in using past tense and recount text  recognition was very low category.The finding shown above can be proved that the amount of samples (N=32) and the level of significance (5%), the result of the computation done both manually and SPSS is 0.159. Based on the value in the table r product moment, the computation shows that r_obatined was lower than r_table (r_o<r_t) that is 0.159 < 0.339 and it is categorized as very low correlation. It means that there is a significance correlation between the students’ ability in using simple past tense and in their recount text recognition at the eighth grade students of SMP N 2 MiritKebumen in the academic year of 2012/2013 but the significance value is very low correlation.

Key Words: Correlation, Past Tense, Recount Text