The correlation between the students' learning motivation and their achievement in structure course

It is widely known that motivation has meaningful and big influence in the students’ learning achievement, especially for those who learn English as a foreign language. Motivation is a kind of encouragement or desire to achieve a certain kind of goal. In this case, the students who have a high motivation will work hard to achieve their goal in order to be successful. There are two types of motivation, they are: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In this research, the writer attempted to find out the correlation between the students’ learning motivation and their achievement in structure course. The objective of this study was to know whether there was strong correlation between the students’ learning motivation and their academic achievement in structure course and to find out whether the correlation was positive. The data concerning of the students’ learning motivation was collected using motivation questionnaire that consisted of 50 items constructed by the writer based on the indicator that recommended by Gage and Berliner (1984:374). The recorded data of learning achievement was taken from the students mid-term test score in structure course from second and fourth semester students with the total number of 69 students. The questionnaire was distributed to the students of the second semester and fourth semester in the 2015/2016 academic year. First of all, the data of the students learning motivation collected by using questionnaire was converted into percentage in order to be able to correlate with the students’ achievement score. Second, both variables of the students’ learning motivation and their achievement in structure course were then correlated by using Pearson’s Product Moment. The correlation coefficient between the students’ learning motivation and their achievement was found to be 0.75 that was considered as a strong correlation. The correlation coefficient was also found to be positive, meaning that when the students were highly motivated, they also achieved higher in their learning process. With this correlation coefficient that was higher than r table (0.234), the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. Thus, the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. In other word, it could be concluded that there was correlation between the students’ learning motivation and their achievement in structure course. The writer concludes that high motivation leads the students to achieve higher in their learning process because motivation is an essential factor in successful learning. However, it must be remembered that learning motivation is not the one and only influential factor. There are other essential factors besides motivation. They are: social environment, ability to learn, family background, and effort in study