THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE AND THEIR SPEAKING ABILITY AT THE EIGHTH GRADE OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IT MADANI PEKANBARU

The aims of this research were to know how the students’ vocabulary knowledge at the eighth grade of Junior High School IT Madani Pekanbaru, to know how their speaking ability, and to know whether there is or not correlation between Students’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking ability. This was a correlational design research, which used written test to assess students’ vocabulary knowledge and oral test to assess their speaking ability. The total number of population of this research was 30 students, where the eighth grade of Junior High School IT Madani Pekanbaru only consisted of one class. So, the researcher decided to take all of the population as the sample or respondents. The researcher used Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, the result of the analysis was helped by SPSS 17.00 program. sig-t was 0.000. It was smaller than 0.05 (sig-t < 0.05). The result showed that the scores did correlate between students’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking ability at the eighth grade of junior high school IT Madani Pekanbaru. In addition, it also showed that the coefficient correlation in this research was 0.809, with the level of trust 0.05 (5 %). It was be obtained r table value was 0.361. Meaning that, r table > r sig. (0.809 > 0.361) so, there was a correlation between those variables. In other words, there was a correlation between students’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking ability at the eighth grade students of Junior High School IT Madani Pekanbaru. The less vocabulary that students have, the lower their speaking ability is. Keywords : correlation, vocabulary knowledge, speaking abilit