The Correlation between Students' Motivation and Their English Speaking Ability

Nowadays, although speaking has been taught from Elementary school to Senior High School, many students are still incapable of speaking in English well. This may be caused by the limitation of opportunity to practice it or psychological factors. One of the factors that make the students fail to learn English is due to their low of motivation. As it is known, motivation is one of the factors that can influence the students‟ ability in learning language. This research is quantitative. The design used was expost-facto design. It was conducted at SMPN 19 Bandar Lampung and the participant was class VIII F consisting of 36 students. However there were two students who didnot take part in the study, so the research participants were 34 students only. In collecting the data, the writer applied the questionnaire for measuring the students‟ motivation and subjective test for speaking. Based on the result of this resarch, it is concluded that there is a significant correlation between students‟ motivation and their English speaking ability. The coefficient correlation is 0.873, categorized as high or strong correlation.Keyword: correlation, motivation, role play, speaking ability