Journal of English Language Teaching http://ojs.ikipmataram.ac.id/index.php/joelt DOI:10.33394/jo-elt.v6i1.2345 Volume 6 Nomor 1, Juni 2019 online: 2548-5865, print: 2355-0309 pp.18-24 18 THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION AND LEARNING GRAMMAR Siti Syafi’atul Qomariyah English Department, FPBS IKIP Mataram sitisyafiatulqomariyah@ikipmataram.ac.id Abstract This correlation research aimed to find out whether there is correlation between students’ motivation and learning grammar. The population of this research was the students at the second grade students of MTs Al-Muslimun NW Tegal, which consisted of 104 students. The sample of this research used one class which consisted of 26 students. The sampling technique used simple random sampling. The instruments of this research used grammar test and questionnaire. The result of the analyzed showed that the value of r-test (0.880) was higher than r-table (0.388), in 0.05 of significant level. Based on the result of the study, it could be concluded that there was correlation between students’ motivation and learning grammar. In other words, alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. Keywords: Correlation, Student’s Motivation, and Learning Grammar INTRODUCTION Learning is one of complex problem that influenced by many aspects. One of aspects is motivation. Motivation is probably the most frequently used catch- all term explaining the success or failure of virtually any complex task. Nancy (2013: 23) said that motivation is the act or process of providing a motivating that can cause a person to take some action. In the classroom context, the concept of students’ motivation is used to explain the degree to which students invest attention and effort in various pursuits, which may not be the ones desired by their teachers. Student’s motivation is rooted in students’ subject experiences, especially those connected to their willingness to engage in learning activities and their reason for doing so. Students’ motivation in leaning can be up and down. According to Harmer (2001: 51), there are four sources that effect students motivation in learning those are a). The Society; outside any classroom, there are attitude to language learning and the English language in particular. All of language learning will affect the students’ attitude in the society to the language being studied whether the attitude is positive or negative, b). Significant Others; apart from the culture of the world around the students, their attitude to language learning will be greatly affected by the influence of the people who are close them. The attitude of the students’ peers is crucial. If the students’ critical of the subject or activity, the students’ own motivation may suffer. If there are enthusiastic learners, however, they may take the student along with them, c) The Teacher; in this case, although teacher is using similar method or technique in teaching learning but the results can be different. The teachers need to make the course interesting and make the students participate in learning process, d). The Method; the methods by which the students are taught by the teacher have to 19 have some effect on their motivation in learning. According to Harmer (2001: 51), there are four sources which have effect toward students’ motivation in learning, namely (1) The Society, outside any classroom there are attitude to language learning and the English language in particular. All of language learning will affect the student’s attitude in the society to the language being studied whether the attitude is positive or negative., (2) Significant Others, a part from the culture of the world around the students, the attitude to language learning will be greatly affected by the influence of the people who are close them. The attitude of the students’ peers is crucial. If the students’ critical of the subject or activity, the student’s own motivation may suffer. If there are enthusiastic learners, however, they may take the students along with them., (3) The Teacher, in this case, although teacher is using similar method or technique in teaching learning but the results can be different. The teachers need to make the course interesting and make students participate in learning process., (4) The Method, the method by which the students are taught by the teacher have to have some effect on their motivation in learning. There are many ways that teachers have done to increase students’ motivation. They used various teaching method, teaching strategy, and teaching model. As teachers know that motivation is one of factor which supports student’s learning especially when they are learning English grammar. The researcher also found the problem of motivation especially in learning grammar when researcher conducted observation at MTs Al- Muslimun NW Tegal. The students thought that grammar was very complex and so hard thought. Grammar is one of component in four skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In teaching grammar, there are so many rules that must be pid attention when someone wants to master grammar itself. Someone who can master the grammar, they should make differences between the kind of elements in grammar. The element of grammar is tenses. According to Decapua (2008: 1) explain that grammar is a set of rules. Grammar is also often linked to both explicit and implicit criticisms of people’s use or “misuse” of language, which may have created a sense of resentment or frustration with the notion of grammar. Generally, grammar or structure is sometimes defined as the way words are combining or put together to make correct sentence. We can, however, apply the term, grammatical to the unit which is smaller than sentence (Greenbaum and Nelson, 2002: 1). Based on the definition above, it can be concluding that grammar is set of rules that describe how words and groups of words can be arranged to form sentences in a particular language. There are four indicators of grammar according to Fiklestain (2010: 14) : (1) Sentence. A sentence is the largest independent units of grammar; it begins with capital letter and ends with period, question mark or exclamation point. A sentence is grammatical unit between the constituent parts of which distributional imitational limitation and dependencies can be established, but which can itself be put into distributional class., (2) Morpheme. In linguistics, morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In order words, morphemes are the smallest 20 meaningful unit of a language. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principle difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone., (3) Phrases. A phrase is small group of words that adds meaning to sentence because it is not a complete idea with a subject, verb, and predicate, in other words, phrase is any groups of words which does not have subject and predicate., (4) Clauses. A clause is group of words that includes a subject and predicate, clause also a part of grammar whereas a grammar is set rules that can be arranged how to make sentence into the language. A clause can be distinguished from a phrase, which does not contain subject and verb. RESEARCH METHOD This research is correlation design. As describe by Sukmadinata (2013: 53) correlation is a research study aimed to determine the correlation between one variable with another variable. This research is the second grade students of MTs Al-Muslimun NW Tegal which consist of 104 students. The total sample is 26 students. The Instrument of this research used questionnaire to know students’ motivation which consisted of 20 questions and grammar test consisted of 25 questions. To analyze the data use of count up tricks for each category, for example: strongly agree was 5, agree was 4, undecided was 3, disagree was 2, and strongly disagree was 1. The data analysis used Correlation Pearson Product Moment. Hypothesis was a tentative answer towards a watchfulness problem until proved from data that gathered. Before formulating the hypothesis the researcher firstly needed to state about the hypothesis as whats cited by the experts. The hypothesis of the study that the researcher intended to test were: (1) Alternative hypothesis (Ha) stated that there is a correlation between students with high motivation had grammar higher than students who had low motivation, (2) Null Hypothesis (H0) stated that there is no correlation between students with high motivation had grammar higher than students who had low motivation. FINDING AND DISCUSSION Research Finding The findings obtained when the researcher was conducted at MTs Al- Muslimun NW Tegal. In finding the data, the researcher designed the study based on the questionnaire and grammar test. 1. The Result of Questionnaire The researcher used questionnaire to measure students’ motivation when they are taught used grammar. The questionnaire was given to the students of VIII A of MTs Al-Muslimun NW Tegal in academic 2017/2018 which consist of 26 students. From that raw score, it was found that the highest score of students was 86; the lowest score of students was 51. Further, student’s score of questionnaire. 18 Table 1 Score of Questionnaire The result of questionnaire showed that 11 students (90%) have very motivating category, 7 students (75%) is slightly motivating category, and 8 students (40%) is neutral. It showed that students at MTs Al- Muslimun NW Tegal have high motivation when they are taught grammar. Further, study the following score interpretation of motivation. Table 2 Score Interpretation of Motivation Category Students Percentage Very motivating 11 90% Slightly motivating 7 75% Neutral 8 40% Slightly 0 0% demotivating Very demotivating 0 0% 2. The Result of Grammar Test Based on the result of computation, it was found that the result of students’ grammar test was neutral category. It proved by there are many students got average score, only one student got high score 83 and two students got 58. Further, study of following frequency distribution. 22 Table 3 Frequency Distribution of Grammar Test Figure 1. Histogram and Polygon of Grammar Test 3. The Result of Descriptive Analysis The research computed descriptive analysis to know mean score, standard deviation, mode and median both of questionnaire and grammar score. Further, study of following statistics. Table 4 Statistics VAR00001 VAR00002 N Valid 26 26 Missing 0 0 Mean 73.2692 70.5000 Std. Error of Mean 1.75109 1.24437 Median 72.0000 72.0000 Mode 72.00 68.00 a Std. Deviation 8.92886 6.34508 Sum 1905.00 1833.00 a. Multiple modes exist. The smallest value is shown Based on the table above, it could be seen that mean score of questionnaire is 73, grammar is 70. Standard deviation of questionnaire is 8.93 and grammar is 6.34. median of questionnaire and grammar is similar 72. Mode of questionnaire is 72 and grammar is 68. 4. Testing Hypothesis Table 5 Correlations VAR00001 VAR00002 VAR00001 Pearson Correlation 1 .880 ** Sig. (2- tailed) .000 N 26 26 VAR00002 Pearson Correlation .880 ** 1 Sig. (2- tailed) .000 N 26 26 **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2- tailed). Based on the result of computation, it could be showed that r-test is 0.880. it means that there is high correlation between students’ motivation and learning grammar. Then, the researcher compared the value of r-test nd r-table with degree of significant of 0.05. The value of r-test is higher than r-table (0.880 > 0.388). Thus, the result of implicity that there is a correlation between students with high motivation had grammar higher than students who had low motivation. It means that Null hypothesis (H0) is rejected and Alternative hypothesis is accepted. Discussion Related to the result of this study, high or low motivation also had relationship with students’ achievement of grammar. This happened because it was influenced by students’ motivation in learning. According to Harmer (2001: 51), 23 there are four sources which have effect toward students’ motivation in learning, namely (1) The Society, outside any classroom there are attitude to language learning and the English language in particular. All of language learning will affect the student’s attitude in the society to the language being studied whether the attitude is positive or negative., (2) Significant Others, a part from the culture of the world around the students, the attitude to language learning will be greatly affected by the influence of the people who are close them. The attitude of the students’ peers is crucial. If the students’ critical of the subject or activity, the student’s own motivation may suffer. If there are enthusiastic learners, however, they may take the students along with them., (3) The Teacher, in this case, although teacher is using similar method or technique in teaching learning but the results can be different. The teachers need to make the course interesting and make students participate in learning process., (4) The Method, the method by which the students are taught by the teacher have to have some effect on their motivation in learning The existence of motivation was very important in improving the ability of students and facilitated to achieve what the objectives for the students themselves. CONCLUSION Based on the data obtained and analyzed in the finding nd discussion above, it is clear that students with high motivation level have high grammar and students with low motivation have low grammar. This can be proved by mean score of questionnaire and grammar test. The researcher comes to the conclusion that there is correlation between students with high motivation had grammar higher than students who had low motivation. It means that Null hypothesis (H0) is rejected and Alternative hypothesis is accepted. REFERENCES Ary, Donald. Jacobs, Lucy C., & Razavieh, Asghar. (2002). Introduction Research in Education Sixth Edition. United States of America. Broughton, G., Brumfit, C., Flavell, R., Hill, P., & Pincas, A., (2003). Teaching English As A Foreign Language. The Taylor & Francis E- library. Brown, Douglas, H. (2001). Teaching by Principles An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy Second Edition. San Francisco State University. DeCapua, Andrea. (2008). Grammar for Teachers A Guide to American English for Native and Non-Native Speakers. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, LLC. Greenbaum, Sydney & Nelson, Gerald. (2002). An Introduction to English Grammar. Sydney: Longman. Harmer, Jeremy. (2001). The Practice of English Teaching. 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