Students’ Part of Speech Mastery and Descriptive Writing Ability: Are they correlated?

Abstract

This study aims to find out if there is a correlation between students’ part of speech mastery and their descriptive writing ability. There were 44 students of a public senior high school in West Sumatera, Indonesia as the sample for this study. Part of speech mastery and writing ability tests were used to collect the data and analysed them by using statistically correlational formula. In assessing students’ writing ability, an analytical scoring was used, with the help of two raters. Additionally, to examine students’ part of speech mastery, five multiple choices questions for each part of speech were used. The findings show a strong positive correlation between students’ part of speech mastery and their descriptive writing ability, seen by the data where the r value between variables is 0.779, falling within the coefficient interval of 0.60–0.799, indicating a significant positive relationship between students’ part of speech mastery and their descriptive writing ability. This suggests that prioritizing part of speech mastery in education can improve students’ writing ability. To further investigate this variable, longitudinal, qualitative, and cross-cultural studies can be conducted and the impact of students’ understanding of part of speech on their writing performance can be examined. Additionally, specific populations, the development of educational curriculum and assessments can be investigated to explore the relationship in these groups.