THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ LEARNING MOTIVATION AND THEIR ABILITY IN WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXTS AT THE TENTH GRADE OF STATE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL 7 MANDAU

The purpose of this research was to determine the correlation between students' motivation in learning English and their writing ability State Senior High School 7 Mandau. From the 124 students as a population consisting of four classes, the researcher chose 38 students at the Tenth Grade of State Senior High School 7 Mandau as a sample by using simple random sampling. The research instruments were questionnaires and tests. The questionnaire consisted of 20 items. Descriptive analysis was used to find out the students' motivation in learning English and their writing ability. Then, the data collected were analyzed by using Product Moment Correlation technique to measure the correlation between two variables measured strength and direction of relationship using SPSS (Statistical Product and Service Solution) version 20.0 for windows. Based on the results of the study, it was found that the value of students' learning motivation was 52.65% while their writing ability was 72.31. Relating to the correlation between learning motivation and writing ability, the researcher found that the probability level = 0.045