THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS LEARNING MOTIVATION AND THEIR ENGLISH VOCABULARY MASTERY

Motivation is believed to enhance students' interest in learning, which is helpful in improving their vocabulary mastery. The most important aspect of language learning is vocabulary mastery, because students cannot communicate without it. As previously mentioned, it is not unexpected that motivated students have very good vocabulary mastery. The objectives of the research are: 1) to investigate the ELED students’ motivation level in private Islamic university in Yogyakarta, 2) to investigate the English vocabulary mastery level of the ELED students, 3) to investigate the correlation between ELED students’ motivation level and their English vocabulary mastery. The quantitative approach and correlational design were applied in this study. A total of 108 students from the ELED academic year 2020 from a private Islamic university in Yogyakarta became the sample of this study. In the process of collecting the data, the researcher used probability sampling to get the sample. There were two instruments implemented in this study. Those were a questionnaire used to determine students’ learning motivation and a vocabulary test applied to determine students’ vocabulary mastery. The study discovered that students in the ELED of a private university of Yogyakarta’ batch 2020 had a “very high” motivation in English learning. It was seen from the results of the mean value (3.36), and S.D (0.289). This research also found out that vocabulary mastery of the students was in a “very good” category with mean value (48,66) and S.D (6.541). It showed that the students have a very good vocabulary mastery. Also, the results of the Pearson product-moment showed that there was a positive correlation between the ELED students’ learning motivation and their vocabulary mastery (r. 0.266, p. 0.005). A positive correlation indicates that an increase in students' learning motivation level followed by an increase in students' vocabulary mastery level.