THE CORRELATION ANALYSIS BETWEEN VOCABULARY MASTERY AND READING COMPREHENSION

Abstract

Although English has been taught in schools starting from kindergarten/elementary to junior high school levels, the fact shows that many student still difficult to read English texts. They may read fast but get nothing or they need a very long time to understand the texts. It means that they are not effective readers. It can be assumed that their comprehension skill is not good. The aim of this research was to find out the correlation between the students’ vocabulary mastery and the students’ reading comprehension. There were 26 students participating in this study. The instruments in this research were two kinds of test, they were vocabulary test and reading comprehension test, each test consisted of 20 multiple choice. All the data gained in this research was analyzed by using the formulation of Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. According to the result of the analysis and statistical calculate, by comparing the values of r_xy and r_t, the result was r_xy was bigger than r_t, in other words r_count was higher than r table. It means that there was correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension and coefficient correlation was high, in this case the alternative hypothesis is accepted. Based on the finding from this research, it could be concluded that vocabulary mastery helps the students to comprehend the text. To solve the problem in comprehending the text in which students should have sufficient vocabulary that can help them in doing their in reading test.