Correlational Study of Students’ Speaking Competence and Writing Competence and the Impact in Students’ Performance in English

Purpose of Study: This research is intended to answer the question of whether there is a correlation between students speaking competence and writing competence and the impact on students’ performance in writing and speaking. This research was preceded with the early assumption that students with high competence in speaking will surely have high competence in writing since both are productive skills which demand students to produce language orally or written. But in reality, the researcher found several pieces of evidence that someone with high competence in writing usually does not have good speaking performance. Similarly, most students who are active in speaking cannot write very well. Methodology: This research is done to English Department students at Muhammadiyah University. The data of the research is students’ final scores in Speaking IV and Writing III. Both of the subjects are chosen because they are reflected to have an equal measurement on students’ competence in productive skills. In speaking IV (Public Speaking), students are assessed their ability to speak in front of the public with different contexts. While Writing III (Essay Writing) students are trained to write several topics of the essay. Results: The result of the correlation test between speaking and writing used the statistic test Pearson Correlation, with a sample of 36 students. The researcher does not take all of the students who have writing and speaking lesson. The researcher only examines 36 students as the sample. Implications/Applications: From the 36 students there are 7 students who have a significantly better score of speaking than writing. Meanwhile, there are 6 students who got a significantly better score on writing than speaking. The rest, 23 students have the same average score between speaking and writing. From this raw measurement supported by the statistic correlation result that shows there is a very low correlation between speaking and writing. It can be concluded that students who have competence in speaking don’t always have the same level of competence in writing, although both skills are the same productive skills that require students to produce language performance. Oral performance and written performance require slightly different competence.