THE CORRELATION BETWEEN LEARNING STYLE PREFERENCES AND WRITING ACHIEVEMENT OF TENTH GRADE STUDENTS AT A PRIVATE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN PALEMBANG

ABSTRACT Writing skill is considered more difficult compared to other skills. Thus by identifying the students’ learning style preferences, the researcher presumed that both students and teachers are expected to have the solution. The aim of this study was to identify the correlation between learning style preferences and writing achievement and at finding out the relationship between learning style preferences and gender, major, residency, and study resources of tenth grade students at a private senior high school in Palembang. Simple random sampling technique was implemented to select 100 participants within the population of 282 tenth grade students. The instruments used in this study were VARK questionnaire version 7.8, self-made questionnaire of socio-demographic data, and interview. The obtained data were analyzed by using IBM SPSS software, one-way ANOVA, and chi-square. It was concluded by using ANOVA that there was no correlation between learning style preferences and writing achievement (p = 0.062). Meanwhile, a relationship was found between class and learning style preferences by using chi-square test (p = 0.007). Based on the results of the interview, the importance of knowing each student’s learning style preferences was claimed to be very crucial to help studying more effective and easier. Hence, it was expected that this study gave significant information to students, teachers, school, and future researchers. Keywords: Learning style preferences, writing achievement, socio�demographic characteristi