The Correlation Between Student's Mastery of Past Tense and Their Ability in Writing Narrative Text at IAIN Langsa

This final project is about the correlation between the students’ mastery of past tense and their ability in writing narrative text among the fifth semester students of English Department of IAIN Langsa. The basic problem I wanted to discuss in this final project was the importance of past tense mastery among the fifth semester students of English Department of IAIN Langsa in order to develop their skills, especially in writing ability. The final project had several objectives, which were to find out the level of past tense mastery of the fifth semester students of English Department of IAIN Langsa, to find out their writing narrative ability, and to find out whether there is a correlation between the students’ mastery of past tense and their writing narrative ability. The population of this final project was the fifth semester students of English Department of IAIN Langsa. I took 30 students as the samples by applying random sampling technique. After conducting the research, I found that the average score of the students’ past tense mastery was 66.0, that was in fair level. Likewise, their writing narrative score was fair referring to their average score, which were 71.20. Moreover, the result of data analysis using SPSS shows that the correlation coefficient between the two variables (past tense mastery and writing narrative text ability) is 0.814, while the critical value for 30 samples and 95% confidence is 0.361. Since the correlation coefficient obtained (0.814) is higher than the table value (0.361), it means that there is a significant positive correlation between the two variables and the correlation is considered to be substantial. Based on the research findings, I give some suggestions, which are the lecturers should find an effective way to develop the students’ mastery of past tense and similarly, the students have to try to improve their tenses (past tense) in that order to get a good achievement in writing narrative. Furthermore, since past tense is not explicitly specified in the curriculum, the lecturers have a duty to help their students in improving their mastery of past tense