THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ UNDERSTNDING OF ENGLISH POEM AND THEIR ABITLITY TO TRANSFORM IT INTO NARRATIVE TEXT

Abstract

The paper entitled, “The Correlation between Students’ Understanding of English Poem and Their Ability to Transform it into Narrative Text” is aimed to find out whether or not there is a correlation between students’ understanding of English poem and their ability to transform it into narrative text. The population of the research is the fifth semester students of English Education Study Program Faculty of Teacher Training and Educational Sciences Pakuan University. Thirty six students were taken as the sample and they were asked to do two tests. The first test is reading comprehension based on three poems given: ‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Fire and Ice’ and also ‘The Secret Sits’ from Robert Frost. The second test is writing three narrative texts based on their understanding from the poems’ theme.  The correlation coefficient is found out using Pearson Product Moment formula. However, 22.2 % of the total sample did not write three narrative texts completely. Therefore, she only calculated and analyzed 28 students. The result of correlation coefficient is 0.56 which is higher than the value of r-table in the significant level 0.05 with degree of freedom value (0.388). It means that the alternative hypothesis (Ha) is accepted. It shows that there is quite low correlation between students’ understanding of English poem and their ability to transform it into narrative text. She concludes that not all of the students who have high score in reading comprehension understand the poems and are inspired to transform their interpretation into a narrative text.