EFL Students’ Grammar Mastery and Writing Skill: A Correlational Study. Skripsi, English Education Department Faculty of Teacher Training and Education

Abstract

The Global era recently forces people to place English as a second language. This condition makes English becomes a crucial language to know, enhancing the second language, the students must face several steps such as exercises. The English language itself contains parts of its features such as vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation; whereas the skills used are listening, speaking, reading and writing. In the educational field, writing usually becomes one of the main priorities among students and every priority may be supported by other skills. The purpose of this study is to determine students' grammar and writing ability levels, as well as the relationship between grammar mastery and writing proficiency. The participants of this research were 4th semester students of English department of UNISMA. The instrument used in this study was students’ score documentation that were got from the administration office of English Department. The data were analyzed by calculating the mean scores and the r-value of Pearson correlation coefficient on SPSS 20. The study uncovers the mean score of the students' grammar was 74.37 which means that students experienced a good level of grammar. The second mean score was the writing score which was 75.27, so it can be concluded that the students were in a good level of writing. For the most frequent score of the students’ grammar was 72.1%, meanwhile the writing score was 64.6%. but on the other hand, there were students who were in very poor level of grammar and writing in which the grammar was in 1.3 % and the writing was in 2.5 %. The correlation between the students' grammar and their writing achievement is represented by the result showed r (79) = .253 with p-value 0.01 < 0.025 < 0.05 which means that there is correlation between students’ grammar mastery and writing skill and that the correlation between the two variable is significant, but the strength of the correlation was positively weak. It can be concluded that grammar mastery is not the main factor that can assist students’ writing skill. The findings of the study suggest that English learners should look for some factors that can support their writing skill. Educators could apply another skill besides grammar to enhance students’ writing skill. A different skill such as speaking or listening, larger scale of the research, another research design, and a deeper investigation of the topic are suggested to be conducted by further researchers.

Key Words: Grammar Mastery, Writing Achievement, Correlation