The Relationship Between Students’ Vocabulary Mastery and Their Writing Descriptive Text for Seventh Graders of SMPN 21 Malang

ABSTRAK Keywords: Relationship, Vocabulary mastery, Writing Skill, Descriptive Text. Almost all skills in English and vocabulary mastery have a strong relationship. It allows people to express their ideas and communicate effectively in oral or written. This research focused on the relationship between vocabulary mastery and students writing skill. The objective of this research was to find the relationship between students’ vocabulary mastery and their writing skill in descriptive text for Seventh grades students of SMPN 21 Malang. The research was carried out at SMP Negeri 21 Malang on April 2018. The method of this study was correlation quantitative research by using correlational design. The subject was one of the classes of seventh grade which consisted of 36 students. The instruments used in this research were vocabulary test and writing test. The data were collected by testing the 38 questions in multiple choice of vocabulary test to the students, and testing their writing skill by making some paragraphs about descriptive text. The data were analyzed using some steps; evaluating students’ vocabulary mastery using vocabulary test, evaluating students’ writings using scoring rubric from inter-rater realibility, analyzing the data using Pearson Product Moment Correlation to find out the correlation between the score of students’ vocabulary mastery and the score of writing test, also determining how the null hypothesis is accepted or rejected. The result showed that there was a positive correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and their writing skill in descriptive text with the correlation coefficient 0,870. It showed that the significant level of both vocabulary score and writing score are .000, which means it is smaller than .05 (.000 ≤ .05). It means that the null hypothesis is rejected and the alternative hypothesis is accepted. In conclusion, the researcher found that there is a significant correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and students’ writing skill in descriptive text because the more students master the vocabulary, the more students writing ability especially in descriptive text. It shown by the high correlation between two aspects that are vocabulary test’ score and writing score that got from the seventh grades students in SMPN 21 Malang. As the suggestion, similar study could be conducted by doing in-depth interview and careful observation to obtain detailed data about the vocabulary teaching and writing teaching