INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 2022, VOL. 2, NO. 2, 62 – 70 DOI: 10.53402/ijesss.v2i2.48 OPEN ACCESS CONTACT Gusti Rayyan Noor gustirayyannoor31@gmail.com © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Lighthouse Publishing. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The correlation of English students’ reading habits and their writing ability Gusti Rayyan Noor 1* Dini Noor Arini 2 Elvina Arapah 3 1-3 English Language Education Study Program, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin, Indonesia ABSTRACT KEYWORDS While writing is critical in education, it is a difficult skill to master. Reading is one of the many factors that affect writing. Numerous studies have established a link between reading and writing. With that assumption, this study will examine the relationship between English reading habits and writing ability among students enrolled in the Advanced Writing Course at the English Language Education Study Program of Lambung Mangkurat University. This study adopted a quantitative approach and a correlational design, with students from batch 2018 as the research population. Using a simple random sampling technique, 50 students were randomly selected to serve as samples. A questionnaire was used to ascertain the students' reading habits, whereas a test was used to ascertain their writing abilities. Pearson Product- Moment Coefficient Correlation was then used to determine the correlation between the variables. The result showed that the correlation coefficient was 0.211 and the significance value was 0.141, indicating that H0 is acceptable because the sig. value was ≥ 0.05. Therefore, there is a weak and negative correlation between students' reading habits and their writing ability. This occurred because many students with strong reading habits also have weak writing abilities, implying that the correlation between the two variables is weak. It is suggested that students develop a reading habit by beginning with small steps such as selecting a short, easy-to-read book, setting small goals, making reading enjoyable, making reading friends, and remaining consistent. Correlation; reading habits; writing ability Received: 18 February 2022 Accepted: 28 March 2022 Published: 5 April 2022 Introduction Among English skills, writing is regarded as one of the important language skills because it is used widely in the educational field. Walsh in Klimova & F. (2013) stated that college students did many of professional communication through writing such as proposals, reports, e-mails, and etc. Students who are unable to compose good writing will have difficulties in their college life. Because of that, improving writing skills is very crucial for college students. Besides the importance of writing, it is also considered as a difficult skill to master because of its complexity. It requires an ability to invent ideas and transfer it onto a sheet of paper in an understandable way for the readers (Brown, 2007). The ideas to write can derived from a wide range of sources and experiences, and one of them is from reading activities because students usually discover new information and knowledge from it. By doing a lot of reading activities, the students would gain more information which contributes to finding new ideas. Reading activity which is done regularly and continuously is called reading habits (Santoso & A., 2014). Having a good reading habit will give many benefits to students and one of them is to their writing ability. Krashen in Maula (2015) stated that reading contributes to the knowledge of writing’s language, grammar, vocabulary, and style of the discourse which the writer used. It will improve the writing style which is acceptable for schools, business, and scientific community. In other words, building reading habits is very good for students because it can help them to sharpen their writing ability.