ABSTRACT

Rizali, Muhammad. 2018. “Correlation between Students’ Reading Habit and their Ability in Writing Recount Text in 9th Grade Students of SMP Negeri 1 Banjarmasin. Thesis, English Department, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin, Advisors: (I) Dr. Rina Listia, M.Pd, (II) Asmi Rusmanayati, S.Pd, M.Sc.

Key words: reading habit, recount text, writing ability.

Writing activity involves reading activity in advance. Reading will help the writing process and reading also enriches the writers with vocabularies and the styles of writing. In order to get a lot of information and knowledge, the students need to read often in order to make reading become their habit. This research is to investigate how reading habit relates to the students’ writing ability and describe the degree of correlation between students’ reading habit and writing recount text ability. 

This research used questionnaire and written test to collect the data. The questionnaire consisted of 20 items which related to the factors that indicate reading habit. Meanwhile for the writing test, the students were asked to write a personal recount text about their holiday. Then, the data collected are analyzed by SPSS.

The result indicates that there is a significant positive correlation between students’ reading and their ability in writing recount text with degree of freedom equals to 63 (df=63) and level of significance is bigger than critical value (0,251> 0.2441), so the result shows significant positive correlation.

Based on the result, there is a positive significant correlation between reading habit and students’ writing ability in writing recount, the students should realize that reading habit has an important role in learning process. It is suggested for the students to do the reading activity frequently. The teacher should always motivate students in reading and writing, for instance by giving them various reading materials to sustain their habit in reading and should be more attentive to the students’ need in reading materials at school.