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ABSTRACT

Heryanto. The Correlation between Students Mastery of Past Tense and
Their Achievement in Writing Recount Text. Thesis. Faculty of Languages and
Literatures. State University of Makassar. Supervised by Kisman Salija and
Maemuna Muhayyang.

The objective of the research was to find out the correlation between
students mastery of past tense and their achievement in writing recount text of
SMA Negeri 3 Takalar. The research employed correlation method with the
inferential statistics analysis. The population was the second year students of
SMA Negeri 3 Takalar. This research used cluster random sampling, where the
researcher took IX IA 4 class as the sample. It consisted of 30 students. The
variable of this research were the students mastery of past tense and the students
achievement in writing recount text. The instruments of this research were past
tense test in multiple forms and writing recount text. Past tense test was used to
find out the mastery of past tense of the students. Writing recount text test was
used to find out the students achievement in writing recount text. The result of
this research indicated that there was high correlation between the students
mastery of past tense and their achievement in writing recount text. It was shown
by the mean score of their past tense test which was 53, it was then classified as
poor. Furthermore, the mean score of the students achievement in writing recount
text was 62. It was then classified as average. Therefore, the last result of Pearson
Product Moment Formula (rxy) was 0.668 which showed that there was a high
correlation between the mastery of past tense and writing recount text of the
students. The result of rxy was also higher than the r table 0.37 with the standard
of significant was 0.05. It proved that there was a reason to accept the alternative
hypothesis (H1). Based on the result of analysis, the researcher concluded that
there was a significant correlation between the students mastery of past tense and
their achievement in writing recount text.