THE CORRELATION BETWEEN VOCABULARY MASTERY AND READING COMPREHENSION AT SMA MUHAMMADIYAH 7 YOGYAKARTA

*58 The students at SMA Muhammadiyah 7 Yogyakarta have to improve their reading comprehension in which they need vocabulary mastery to solve the problem in reading comprehension. Vocabulary mastery is an important skill to improve students reading comprehension. For the high school students, reading comprehension is one of the parts in English test in the semester examination and national examination. Thus, the students should master vocabulary mastery. The objectives of this research are to find the students’ vocabulary mastery and their reading comprehension. Also to find the correlation between vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension. There are three research questions proposed in this study namely how students’ vocabulary mastery is, how students’ reading comprehension is, and how the correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and their reading comprehension is.
This research implemented correlational study which involved 132 students of SMA Muhammadiyah 7 Yogyakarta class XI academic year 2015/2016. The instruments used in this research were vocabulary mastery test to answer the first research question and reading comprehension test to answer the second research question. The data of this research were analyzed using descriptive statistics in SPSS program version 20.0 to find out students’ vocabulary mastery and students’ reading comprehension. In addition, Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient (r) in SPSS program version 20.0 was used to answer the third research question about the correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and their reading comprehension.
The result showed that the students at SMA Muhammadiyah 7 Yogyakarta class XI academic year 2015/2016 had low level of vocabulary mastery. It can be seen from the mean score of students’ vocabulary mastery that is 7.06 which belongs to the “low” level. The result of the second research question was students at SMA Muhammadiyah 7 Yogyakarta class XI academic year 2015/2016 had low level of reading comprehension. It is seen from the mean score of students’ reading comprehension which 4.15. Based on the categories of students’ reading comprehension score, 4.15 belongs to the “low” level category. Then, the result of the third research question showed that the correlation coefficient of this study is 0.149. There is a positive correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and their reading comprehension but the strength of the correlation is very low correlation. It means, the H1 (the alternative hypothesis) is accepted and the H0 (the null hypothesis) is rejected.