ABSTRACT
Harianto. 2008. The correlation between Simple Tenses Mastery and Reading Comprehension Ability of the second year students of SMP Muhammadiyah 3 Samarinda in the academic year 2007/2008. Advisor 1) Drs. Muh. Natsir, M.Pd, 2) Drs. Suyatman.
Tenses and reading text cannot be separated. In Reading text, there must be the sentence patterns. In the sentence patterns, there must be tenses. So, to comprehend the textwell, the students should know and master the sentence patterns well, including the tenses.
The main problem of this study is: “How is the correlation between the simple tensesmastery and reading comprehension ability?” The main purpose of this study is to find outwhether simple tenses mastery and reading comprehension ability have positive and significant
correlation or not.
The total population in this study was 64 students and the writer took all of them as the
samples. The writer took the score of simple tenses mastery achievement and reading
comprehension achievement by employing a several test. In the data analysis, the writer usedcorrelation product moment formula by Karl Pearson.
The data were obtained from a test on simple tenses and on reading comprehension.Then they are tested to a group of the students. These tests provided two sets of data; the firstdata were scores of simple tenses test and the second were the scores of reading comprehensiontest. The data were analyzed by using Product Moment Formula to correlate the result of thetest on simple tenses and a test on reading comprehension.
Based on the result of this study the writer comes to the conclusions that: 1) Thestudents’ mastery on simple tenses was good since the Mean score was 67.03). 2) The students’ability on reading comprehension was good since the Mean score was 67.34. 3) There was apositive and significant correlation between simple tenses mastery and reading comprehensionability of the second year students of SMP Muhammadiyah 3 Samarinda in the academic year2007/2008 since the result shows that r > r or 0.829 > 0.254 which means H is accepted.