THE CORRELATION BETWEEN THE USE OF AUTHENTIC TEXTS AND DUSCOURSE COMPETENCE AMONG STADENTS OF ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF UNIVERSITAS MUHAMMADIYAH YOGYAKARTA ACADEMIC YEAR 2011/2012.

The need for authentic texts to improve students’ communicative competence in language teaching and learning has been acknowledged by researchers and teachers in EFL and ESL contexts. The importance of authentic texts also brought English Education Department of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (EED UMY) to a decision to use them in teaching and learning process. This research tends to elicit the correlation between the use of authentic texts and discourse competence as the sub part of communicative competence among students of EED UMY. The analysis of discourse competence in this research only focuses on cohesion and coherence in written communication. The correlational research design with quantitative analysis was used in order to accomplish the objectives of this research. The participants were 30 third-year students of EED UMY. Questionnaire and a set of writing test were given to the participants to measure their reading habit and discourse competence. The analysis of the result shows that the Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation coefficient (r) is .137 which means there is a positive correlation between the use of authentic texts and students’ discourse competence. In addition, the alternative hypothesis (Hı) ‘there is a correlation between the use of authentic texts and students’ discourse competence’, is accepted. A major conclusion of this research is there is a positive correlation between the use of authentic texts and students’ discourse competence. Teachers, therefore, should consider using more authentic texts for teaching and learning process in English as Foreign Language (EFL) contexts.
Keywords: authentic texts, communicative competence, discourse competence