THE CORRELATION BETWEEN SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT MASTERY AND STUDENTS’ WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT ABILITY AT EIGHTH GRADE OF SMP MUHAMMADIYAH 1 GRESIK

Most of students are able to understand how to make a good paragraph by guiding the generic structure of some text, but it was not same in writing skill of making a good sentence, there were some mistakes in grammatical roles, that is subject-verb agreement; in this study only focus on simple present tense, considering that simple present tense stated in syllabus become basic rule for students to make and use sentences to communicate in daily life, beside that it is the language feature of descriptive text. This quantitative correlational study wants to investigate whether there is significant correlation between subject-verb agreement mastery and students’ writing descriptive text ability or not. So, the researcher gave two tests to 28 students in E Class, which are grammar test (20 items) as representation of subject-verb agreement mastery and writing test for collecting writing score to represent students’ writing descriptive text ability. The writing test was analyzed by rubric criteria by two correctors which are English teacher and the researcher. For checking validity and reliability, the researcher used Cronbach's Alpha. Meanwhile in analyzing data, the researcher used Pearson Product Moment from SPSS 16.0 program. From calculating data, the findings showed that there was positive and moderate correlation between subject-verb agreement mastery and students’ writing descriptive text ability looked from coefficient correlation (r-value) is 0.424. Furthermore, the sig. two-tailed (p-value) is 0.024, it means that null hypothesis (H0) cannot be rejected or null hypothesis (H0) is accepted, so it can be concluded that there was no significant correlation between subject-verb agreement mastery and students’ writing descriptive text ability at eighth grade of SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Gresik. Finally the researcher concluded that the students who are mastering subject-verb agreement do not mean they can write descriptive text well or subject-verb agreement gives little contribution to students’ writing descriptive text ability. It was proved by the score from both two tests as the instruments, specifically the average of grammar test score are higher than writing test score and also from the result of findings