45 THE CORRELATION BETWEEN READING ATTITUDE AND WRITING ACHIEVEMENT OF THE ELEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMA MUHAMMADIYAH 6 PALEMBANG AYU LESTARI MUHAMAD HOLANDYAH UIN Raden Fatah Palembang e-mail: ayuelestari39@yahoo.co.id ABSTRACT: This research was aimed at investigating if there was a correlation between reading attitude and writing achievement of the eleventh grade students of SMA Muhammadiyah 6 Palembang. The writer used correlational research method to find out the relationship between students’ reading attitude and writing achievement. One hundred and ten students participated in this research with the age ranged from 15-17 years old. The writer used ready-made questionnaire used by Tullock-Rhody, Regina and Alexander, J Estill, 1980 and writing test to collect the data. The result of the test were analyzed by using Pearson Product Moment through SPSS (Statistical Package for Social and Science) 16.0. Meanwhile, to measure the correlation between the students’ reading attitude and their writing achievement, it was also referred to the interval coefficient for interpreting the correlation coefficient. From the analysis, it was showed that there was correlation between the two variables since the score of significance .701 higher 0.199 . The factors that influenced this conditions were; 1) most of students spent their time in the library in order to get information, 2) students were interested to read academic and non academic books, 3) more students involved in reading and writing activity. Key words: Reading attitude, writing achievement Introduction In English language, there are four skills that students must know and learn. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Among the four skills, reading and writing are important skills because they can be easily linked to other language skills and give more information than listening and speaking. According to McShane (2005, p.7), reading and writing are a key to learning in all aspects of life. They provide access to get information and knowledge, facilitate life-long learning, and open doors to opportunity. Moreover, in the senior high school level, the eleventh grade students have to focus on the specific skills as the courses in their study, especially reading and writing courses. In regard to reading, it helps readers improve their knowledge if they have good reading attitude. But many students still get difficulty to understand about what they are reading. Then it makes them lazy to read. Reading attitude is defined as a state of mind, accompanied by feeling and mailto:ayuelestari39@yahoo.co.id 46 emotions that makes reading more or less probable (Smith, 2001, p.215). Unfortunately, many of the students all over the world do not think the same thing, especially for those who use English as their foreign language. Based on Gilani Research Foundation in Pakistan (2008, p.1), 27% of their respondents read apart from those prescribed in the students’ syllabi and 73% did not read books. This phenomenon is an encouraging indication in a country with low literacy rate. In Indonesia, some of the students are reluctant to read books because they think that reading is not the main activity to get new information. A research conducted by Siswati (2010, p.124) in one of the public universities in Central Java showed that 85.9% chose to watch television, 40.3% chose to listen to radio as their source of information while reading was just 23.5%. Another research done by Strauss (2012, p.1) found that Thai L2 students were reluctant to read scientific English books; they chose magazine and fiction English books as their favorite options. They read English text books just to find the information for example technology and traveling book or when an examination pushed them to read an English book. On the other hand, writing is another challenging skill since there are many aspects that must be taken into account such as word choices, grammar, punctuation, spelling, coherence, and still many others. Horsburgh (2009, p.9) defines writing as a laborious activity for students since it is not a natural activity and requires strong motivation and a great deal of practice. Richards and Renandya (2002, p.303) add that another difficulty in writing is not only in generating and composing the ideas, but also in presenting the ideas into the text. In addition, writing is a way to produce language that comes from our thought. By writing, students can share their feeling, ideas and anything that exist in their mind. Furthermore, reading and writing skills are said to be so much interrelated at either primary, secondary and/or tertiary levels of education that it has been claimed that ‘‘… good writers are good readers… Good reading is the key to becoming a good writer…Becoming a good writer works together with becoming a good reader’’ (Kessler, 2006, pp.5-9 cited in Farahzad and Emam, 2010, p.1). Seen from another perspective, throughout the years of their stay at school, senior high school students are expected to spend the lion's share of their time primarily on reading many kinds of texts. It is supported by Jolliffe and Harl (2008, p.599) that an array of national surveys and studies suggests that neither high school nor college students spend much time preparing for 47 class, the central activity of which we presume to be reading assigned articles, chapters, and books. In additional, (Pamuji, 2013, pp. 21-23) stated that reading attitude gave positive correlates for writing achievement. It could be seen from the result of students in the process teaching and learning English and most of students got best score in writing. The purpose of this study is to describe the reading attitude and writing achievement of the eleventh grade students of SMA Muhammadiyah 6 Palembang. Findings from this study will provide insights into reading behaviours of these students. More importantly, constant reading will help students in academic achievement. Concept of Reading Pardo (2004, p.272) argues that reading is a process in which readers construct meaning by interacting with text through the combination of prior knowledge, previous experience, information in the text and the stance the reader takes in relationship to the text. Meanwhile, Pang et al. (2003, p.6) state that reading is about understanding written text. It is a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Moreover, Nunan (2005, p.69) claims that reading is a set of skill that involves making sense and deriving meaning from printed the word. Furthermore Horsburgh (2009, p.3) argues that reading is a complicated activity requiring considerable skills. Based on the definitions above, it can be assumed that reading is a process of interaction between the reader and the text which includes constant process of guessing, decoding written symbols that involves reacting to a written text in order to get information from the text. Concept of Attitude Attitudes are one of these main concepts. The word attitude, which comes from the Latin word “aptus” meaning suitability or adaptation, means behavior, state and line of conduct. There exist different definitions of the term “Attitude”, which is characterized as learned tendencies that prompt an individual to exhibit certain behaviors in front of certain people, things and situations (Unal and Iseri, 2012, p. 1067). For example, a child to have positive attitudes towards reading, it is necessary to carefully select books that will provide the child with willingness to read and deliver them to the student. While attitudes play a significant role in student success, it 48 is highly difficult to develop an attitude in an individual towards an object or to alter the existing attitude. In order to be able to alter students' attitudes, it is primarily necessary to reveal the characteristics of the intended group and the factors that pave the way for the formation and development of their attitudes. Concept of Reading Attitude Attitude is one of basic when the students want to master language. The word "attitude" is a Latin origin word. Its Latin origin is "animus". It means "ready to act". According to İskender (2007, p. 632) cited in Unal and Iseri (2012, p. 1067) states that attitudes, which are of dynamic, continuous, incentive and motivative character, influence an individual's emotions, thoughts and behaviors by rendering them compatible to each other. Furthermore, reading opens many doors, to employment, higher education and lifelong learning. In addition, Smith (2001, p.215) states that reading attitudes are defined as a state of mind, accompanied by feelings and emotions that makes reading more or less probable. In addition, there are many researchers who have tried hard to find the best way to improve students’ reading attitude. Besides, reading is an essential attitude that students need to have. It helps teacher a lot to succeed in helping students to learn better. Concept of Writing Writing is a process of expressing ideas or thoughts in sequence in order to communicate with others in written form. It is also considered as a difficult skill in English because it is a process that needs time. Many students find that writing is very difficult to acquire owing to its complex components such as mechanics, grammar, punctuations, spelling and most importantly its unity, coherence, cohesion and completeness as well as its balanced paragraph development. Lyons and Heasley (2009, p.13) explain that writing is clearly a complex process, and is frequently accepted as being the last language skill to be required. In addition, Nunan (1999, p. 271) state that writing is probably the most difficult thing there is to do in language. So, writing is most difficult skill and complex process in English. 49 Concept of Writing Achievement Writing achievement is the students’ ability in expressing their ideas, thoughts, and feelings in writing that is measured by a writing test. The result of the test is assigned in the form of grades. In this study, students’ writing achievement is the result of writing achievement test of SMA Muhammadiyah 6 Palembang in the academic year 2015/2016 given in the form of a narrative writing test. Narrative is a kind of genre aimed to entertain, to gain and hold the reader’s interest in a story (Wahidi, 2009, p.7). Hence, it is as a kind of writing mostly used in junior and senior high school classes. In the context of writing, every text has structure to compose. Method of the Study In this study, the writer used correlational research method to find out the relationship between students’ reading attitude and writing achievement. Correlation design is procedures in quantitative research in which investigators measure the degree of association (relationship) between two or more variables using the statistical procedure of correlation analysis (Creswell, 2005, p.52). The researcher used this method because she wanted to measure the data and analyzed them based on the problems and objectives of the study. The procedures consisted of identifying the association between or among variables to make predictions about an outcome, plotting on a graph between variables to determine the direction, form, and strength of the association, and using appropriate correlational statistics in the design based on whether the data are continuous or categorical and whether the form of the data is linear or nonlinear, and a correlation matrix of the Pearson Coefficients in the study (Creswell, 2005, p. 344). Population and Sample Fraenkle and Wallen (2012, p.92) state that the population is the group of interest to the researcher to whom the researcher generalizes the results of the study. The population of this research is the eleventh grade students of SMA Muhammadiyah 6 Palembang. Based on the data, there are 110 students in the academic year 2015/2016. Within the target population, the researcher selects a sample for the study. Creswell (2005, p.146) states that sample is the group of participants in a study selected from the target population. The sample of this research was 50 taken by using purposive sampling method. Based on Creswell (2005, p. 204), in this method, the researchers intentionally select individuals and sites to learn and understand the central phenomenon whether they are “information rich”. In this research, the researcher selected the sample based on the following criteria: (1) The students who were English score below Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal (KKM), that was 75, (2) The students were in the same grade (the eleventh grade), (3) The students who got more or less same score of English in the previous semester (the writer assumed the score that they got would represent their ability in writing English. To get the data of this point, the writer asked English teacher of SMA Muhammadiyah 6 Palembang), and (4) The students had different attitude toward reading. Findings and Discussion Validity and Reliability Test To find out the validity of the questionnaire, content validity was used. From the analysis, it was found that there were 8 items in positive statement considered valid. They were question items number 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 22, 23. Furthermore, there were 8 items in negative statement were valid. They were items number 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19. So, it revealed that from 25 items of the questionnaire, 16 of them were valid and appropriate to collect the data. In addition, the researcher made use of content validity to find out the validity of the writing test by having expert judgment. There were three experts evaluating the test whether it was appropriate or not. The raters were on English lecturers of UIN Raden Fatah Palembang. There were 5 evaluated items: instruction, topic, time allocation, content and rubric. The results showed that topic, time allocation and rubric were very appropriate, and instruction and content were appropriate. In addition, to measure the reliabilty of the questionnaire, the researcher applied Cronbach’s Alpha technique which was carried out by using SPSS to find out the internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire. It was found that the reliability coefficient was .7369. Further, to get the reliability of the writing test, inter-rater reliability was used. By using Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient, the result from each rater were correlated. It showed that there were correlation among them with the coefficients .303, .458 and .244 that were significant at 0.01 level. 51 Normality and Linearity Test From the results of the analysis, it was found that the data from each variable were all normal and appropriate for analysis the data with coefficient .062 for reading attitude and .200 for writing achievement. For linearity test, deviation of linearity was obtained. If probabilty score was more than .05. From the result of the analysis, it was found that the two variable, reading attitude and writing achievement were linear with coefficient .307. Hypotheses Testing Based on the result of the analysis, the writer found that there was correlation between the students’ reading attitude and their writing achievement since the score of significance (.701) was between 0.60 and 0.799. 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