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40 

 

 
ELT FORUM 7 (2) (2018) 

 

Journal of English Language Teaching 

 
http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/elt 

 
 

THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ 

READING COMPREHENSION AND THEIR 

PARAPHRASING ABILITY IN NARRATIVE TEXT 

 

Ade Resky Swarini, Dwi Anggani Linggar Bharati, Djoko Sutopo  
 

English Department, Faculty of Languages and Arts, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia

 

Article Info 
________________  
Article History: 

Received in October 

2018  
Approved in November 

2018  

Published in January 

2019 

________________  
Keywords: correlation, 
reading comprehension, 
paraphrasing ability, 
narrative text.  
____________________ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract  
___________________________________________________________________ 
Paraphrasing activity allows the students to interpret what they have understood 

from the text in reading activity. This study investigates the correlation of the 

students’ reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text. 

There are two hypotheses in this research; null hypothesis (Ho) and the alternative 

hypothesis (Ha). The null hypothesis says “There is no correlation between students’ 

reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text”. Then, Ha 

says “There is a correlation between students’ reading comprehension and their 

paraphrasing ability in narrative text”.  

The population of this study is the eleventh graders of SMAN 1 Ambarawa in the 

academic year of 2016/2017. The students of XI MIPA 5 are taken as the samples. 

The design of this study is explanatory research design. The data are gained by 

administering two kinds of tests; reading comprehension and paraphrasing tests. 

Those tests are administered twice by using two different texts. There are three main 

processes in applying this method in the study; the use of the scatterplot, Pearson 

product moment coefficient, and correlation coefficient interpretation. Scatterplots 

displays that there is a positive linear relationship. Then, the data are calculated by 

using the Pearson product moment to know the degree of relationship among the 

variables. The results of the computation of correlation coefficient applied to the 

sample are 0.67 and 0.84. The consultation to the critical value of the r Product 

Moment with 95% confidence level and the number of the subjects 32 is 0.349. It 

means that the results obtained from the computation are higher than its critical 

value. Next, the results of the computation of correlation coefficient are consulted to 

the criteria of correlation coefficient interpretation. The interpretations of the 

relationship are substantial and high to very high. It can be concluded that there is a 

significant positive relationship between students’ reading comprehension ability in 

narrative text (X) and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text (Y) on the eleventh 

graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa in the academic year of 2016/2017. 

 
 
 © 2018 Universitas Negeri Semarang 

  


 Correspondent Address: ISSN 2252-6706 
B3 Building FBS Unnes  

Sekaran, Gunungpati, Semarang, 50229  

E-mail: aderesky123@gmail.com  



A. R. Swarini, D. A. L. Bharati, D. Sutopo / Journal of English Language Teaching 7 (2) (2018) 

41 

 

INTRODUCTION 

Language is important for people to carry out their daily activities. Without language, people 

cannot communicate with other people. It means that we cannot get any information we need, 

because the use of language is to express our communicative needs either in speech or writing.  

English is one of international languages that is most frequently used. It is used in many fields 

of life like in business, politics, education, literature and so on. Because of its role in all over affairs, 

English is mostly learned in non-English-speaking countries, and one of them is Indonesia. In 

Indonesia, English is learned at school from elementary school to university. English is even being 

taught from kindergarten in many big cities. Harris (1969: 9) says that language exists in two forms, 

the spoken and the written. Two language activities are associated with both speech and writing: an 

encoding and a decoding process. Speaking and writing themselves are the encoding processes 

whereby we communicate our ideas, thoughts, or feelings through one or the other form of 

language: and listening and reading are the parallel decoding process by which we “understand” 

either a spoken or written message. In teaching and learning English process, both students and 

teacher can develop their four language skills. And the goal of teaching language is the mastery of 

the four language skills which include listening, speaking, reading and writing skills that correlate 

one and others.   

One of the four language skills is writing skill. Writing is an output of reading skill. This skill 

is very important for us because science and knowledge always have transformation and by writing, 

we can also express our ideas. Here, writing draws the kinds of symbols to describe anything 

recognized by someone and it conveys the message from the writer through those symbols. 

Paraphrasing activity allows the students to interpret what they have understood from the text in 

reading activity. Paraphrasing is, quite simply, restating ideas in different words. In this process, a 

reader (or listener) can choose to paraphrase one statement, a group of statements, or entire passage 

(Kissner, 2006: 6).There are many factors that influence someone’s difficulties in paraphrasing a 

story, such as the input of the ideas from the reading activity. There are many ways to avoid those 

things.  One of them is by comprehending a story in reading activity as the input.  

In senior high school nowadays, the students are expected to learn many kinds of text, such as 

narrative, descriptive, recount, report, procedure, explanation and so on. Therefore, in order to do 

this research, the writer chooses the narrative text. A narrative is a piece of text which tells a story 

and, in doing so, entertains or informs the reader or the listener (Anderson and Anderson, 1997:6).  

By conducting the research in knowing the correlation between students’ reading 

comprehension and their paraphrasing ability, it will figure out how is the students’ reading 

comprehension, how is the students’ paraphrasing ability, and how is the correlation between 

students’ reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text. It will also help the 

students to know what should they do in order to avoid their difficulty in paraphrasing a story of 

narrative text. Moreover, this study will also give the teacher a description about the correlation 

between students’ reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text. Due to 

that point, the teacher will know what should be done in teaching and learning process, especially in 

reading comprehension and paraphrasing of narrative text, so the teacher can help the students not 

only in understanding and comprehending text, but also how to express and convey their ideas in 

writing text.  

METHODS 

Research design used in this study was explanatory research design. It was used to find out 

the correlation between two variables; students’ reading comprehension ability and students’ 



A. R. Swarini, D. A. L. Bharati, D. Sutopo / Journal of English Language Teaching 7 (2) (2018) 

42 

 

paraphrasing ability. The population was the entire of the eleventh grade students of SMA Negeri 1 

Ambarawa in the academic year of 2016/2017. The total number of population was 360 students. 

From the population, I took class XI MIPA 5 with 32 students by using cluster random sampling. In 

collecting the data, I used two tests. There were reading comprehension test within ten multiple 

choice items and paraphrasing test in the form of responsive writing. Before the test was 

administered, the reading test was tried out and analyzed. It was conducted in order to know 

whether the test was valid and reliable or not. After the tryout, the results were analyzed to make 

sure whether the instruments of reading comprehension can be used or not. Then, I conducted the  

research to collect the data. The reading comprehension and paraphrasing tests were administered 

twice with two different narrative texts. The first text entitled “The Legend of Rawa Pening” and the 

other was “The story of Malin Kundang”. I administered those tests in one meeting of two lessons in 

90 minutes. In the first part of the lesson, the students had to read narrative text entitled “The 

Legend of Rawa Pening”. After reading and comprehended the text, the students had to answer ten 

multiple choice questions which would measure their reading comprehension ability in narrative 

text. They had to do that test in ten minutes. After they had done with the reading comprehension 

test, they had to move to the paraphrasing test. Here, I gave them 25 minutes to retell the story that 

they had read before. They had to tell the story in their own words with at least 100 words. After 

conducting the test with the first narrative text, I continued the test in the second part of the lesson. I 

distributed the texts, the booklets, and the answer sheets to the students. In the first ten minutes, the 

students had to read the narrative text entitled “The story of Malin Kundang”. After reading that 

text, they had to answer ten multiple choice items of reading comprehension questions. Then, they 

had to go to the next paraphrasing test. The students had to retell the story, at least in 100 words. 

After conducting the test, I would like to score the test and analyzed the correlation of students’ 

reading comprehension ability and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text. 

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 

The researcher had conducted the test. Then, I analyzed the data by using the statistical 

analysis and interpretation analysis to support the data clearly. Scatterplot was used in analyzing the 

data to describe the association between the two scores. These scatterplots displayed the sets of 

scores in reading comprehension ability and paraphrasing ability in narrative text for participants. 

Here were the scores of the participants which had been achieved and its displayed on the graph.  

 

Figure 4.1 Scatterplot for Reading Comprehension and Paraphrasing Ability of the First Narrative 

Text (The Legend of Rawa Pening) 

 

From the figure 4.1, the distribution of the scores of students reading comprehension and their 

paraphrasing ability showed that there was a positive linear relationship, in which low (or high) 

0

50

100

0 50 100

S
co

re
s 

o
n

 P
ar

ap
h

ra
si

n
g
 

A
b

il
it

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Scores on 

 Reading Comprehension 

Scatterplot of Text 1 



A. R. Swarini, D. A. L. Bharati, D. Sutopo / Journal of English Language Teaching 7 (2) (2018) 

43 

 

scores on one variable related to low (or high) scores on the other variable. It meant the scores of 

students’ reading comprehension ability  was associated with the scores of paraphrasing ability. 

 

Figure 4.2 Scatterplot for Reading Comprehension and Paraphrasing Ability of the Second 

Narrative Text (The Story of Malin Kundang) 

 

Figure 4.2 displayed how the scores of students reading comprehension and their 

paraphrasing ability distributed. According to the graph, I could conclude that there was a positive 

linear relationship. The low (or high) scores on one reading comprehension related to low (or high) 

scores on the paraphrasing ability. 

Then, the data of students’ reading comprehension and paraphrasing ability were calculated 

by using Pearson product moment to know the degree of relationship among those variables.  

The formula of the Pearson Product-Moment is as follows: 

    
             

     
 

(Brown, 2005:143) 

in which: 

rxy  : Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient 

X : each student’s score on Test X 

Mx  : mean on Test X 

Sx : standard deviation on Test X 

Y  : each student’s score on Test Y 

My  : mean on Test Y 

Sy  : standard deviation on Test Y 

N  : the number of the students who took the two tests 

The calculation of the correlation coefficient of the first text (The legend of Rawa Pening) is 

presented below: 

    
      

       
      

The result of the first data shows that          . If rxy ≥ 0.349 there is a significant correlation. 

It can be concluded that from the first data, there is a significant relationship between students’ 

reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text. 

Then, the correlation coefficient of the second data of the reading comprehension and 

paraphrasing ability test is also calculated. The result is presented below: 

    
       

       
      

0

50

100

0 50 100
S

co
re

s 
o
n

 P
ar

ap
h

ra
si

n
g
  

A
b

il
it

y
 

Scores on  

Reading Comprehension 

Scatterplot of Text 2 



A. R. Swarini, D. A. L. Bharati, D. Sutopo / Journal of English Language Teaching 7 (2) (2018) 

44 

 

The calculation of the correlation coefficient from the other data showed that         . If rxy ≥ 

0.349 there is a significant correlation. It could be concluded that from the other data, there was a 

significant relationship between students’ reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in 

narrative text. 

 After I had calculated the degree of relationship between students’ reading comprehension 

and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text, I could interpret the level of relationship among 

those variables based on the following criteria: 

Coefficient (r) Relationship 

.00 to 0.20 Negligible 

.00 to .40 Low 

.40 to .60 Moderate 

.60 to .80 Substantial 

.80 to 1.00 High to very high 

(Best and Kahn, 1995: 308) 

Since the result of the correlation coefficient of the first text (The Legend of Rawa Pening) was 

        , it could be interpreted that the correlation was in the level of substantial. Then, the result of 

the correlation coefficient of the second text (The Story of Malin Kundang) reached         , it could 

be interpreted that the correlation is in the level of high to very high. 

Based on the research finding on students’ reading comprehension ability in narrative text, I 

could say that the students’ reading comprehension ability in narrative text was good. It could be 

seen from the computation in which the average of students’ reading comprehension in narrative 

text reached 69,38 and 73,44. When they were consulted to the table of criteria of ability by Brown, 

the scores are categorized as “average” and “good”. 

The paraphrasing ability of the eleventh graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa could also be 

categorized as “good”. It can be seen from the computation in which the students’ scores in 

paraphrasing ability reached 75,13 and 75,09.  When the scores are consulted to the table of criteria 

of ability suggested by Brown, the scores were categorized as “good”. 

 In relation to the result of the correlation coefficient of the first text (The Legend of Rawa 

Pening) that it was         . When it was consulted to the criteria of the degree of relationship 

suggested by Best and Kahn, it could be interpreted that the correlation was in the level of 

substantial. Then, the result of the correlation coefficient of the second text (The Story of Malin 

Kundang) reached         , it could be interpreted that the correlation was in the level of high to very 

high. According to those results, it could be said that the relationship between students’ reading 

comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text was significant. 

CONCLUSIONS 

The purpose of the research is to answer the research questions of how is the students’ reading 

ability in narrative text, students’ paraphrasing ability in narrative text, and how is the correlation 

between students’ reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text. 

 To obtain the intended data, I arrange the two sets of test with two titles of narrative text. In 

each of the tests, there are reading comprehension test to measure the students’ reading 

comprehension in narrative text and paraphrasing test to measure the students’ paraphrasing ability 

in narrative text. After conducting the research, I come to some conclusions. 

 First, the reading comprehension ability in narrative text of the eleventh graders of SMA 

Negeri 1 Ambarawa is good. It can be seen from the computation in which the average of students’ 

reading comprehension in narrative text reaches 69,38 and 73,44. When they are consulted to the 



A. R. Swarini, D. A. L. Bharati, D. Sutopo / Journal of English Language Teaching 7 (2) (2018) 

45 

 

table of category level by Brown, the scores are categorized as “average” and “good”. So, it can be 

concluded that the eleventh graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa have good reading comprehension 

ability in narrative text. They can comprehend and understand the message that the writer of the 

story wants to deliver to the reader. 

 Second, the paraphrasing ability of the eleventh graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa is also 

categorized as “good”. It can be seen from the computation in which the students’ scores in 

paraphrasing ability reach 75,13 and 75,09.  When the scores are consulted to the table of category 

level of ability suggested by Brown, the scores are categorized as “good”. In conclusion of students’ 

paraphrasing ability in narrative text, the eleventh graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa have a good 

ability in understanding and retelling a story that they have read in a good composition. 

 Third, there is a significant positive relationship between students’ reading comprehension 

and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text on eleventh graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa in 

the academic year of 2016/2017. 

In dealing with the result, the computation of correlation coefficient between students’ 

reading comprehension and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text applied to the sample are 0.67 

and 0.84. Then, the consultation to the critical value of the r Product Moment with 95% confidence 

level and the number of the subjects 32 is 0.349. It means that the result obtained from the 

computation is higher than its critical value. When the results of the computation of correlation 

coefficient are consulted to the criteria of correlation coefficient interpretation suggested by Best and 

Kahn, the interpretations of the relationship are substantial and high to very high. It can be 

concluded that there is a significant positive relationship between students’ reading comprehension 

ability in narrative text (X) and their paraphrasing ability in narrative text (Y) on the eleventh 

graders of SMA Negeri 1 Ambarawa in the academic year of 2016/2017. 

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