The Correlation between Students’ Mastery of Tenses and Their Achievement in Descriptive Writing

The purpose of this study was to find out the correlation between students’ mastery of tenses and their achievement in descriptive writing. This study applied a random sampling technique where the population was all of the third-semester students of English department of UIN Ar-Raniry and the sample was 65 students. The data was collected by administering of Tenses test and Descriptive writing test. The data were analyzed by using Pearson Product Moment to investigate the correlation between both variables. The result showed that the coefficient between variable X and variable Y was rxy = 0.923. The criteria of correlation between two variables among 0.81-0.99 showed a high correlation. The result of the analyses showed that there was a significant correlation between students’ mastery of tenses and their achievement in descriptive writing of English department students of UIN Ar-Raniry. Therefore, the null hypothesis (H0) was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. The result suggested that the students who have a high score in Tenses tests tend to have good descriptive writing and vice versa.