%A - DINA MUSTIKA RINI %J Digital Library %T A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN STUDENTS? ACHIEVEMENT IN LEARNING SIMPLE PAST TENSE TAUGHT THROUGH GROUP WORK AND TAUGHT THROUGH INDIVIDUAL STUDY %X The lack of students competence in mastering the structure pattern, especially simple past tense, usually hinders them to communicate about their past experience and events in English. Meanwhile, past tense becomes one of important tense that should be mastered by the students of SMP. Therefore, the researcher compared two teachings, group work and individual study to investigate the results of applying those two teachings in teaching simple past tense and to find out which one that would give better result than another. This quantitative study reports a research conducted in second year of SMPN 23 Bandar Lampung to find out whether there is significant difference of students? simple past tense achievement between those taught through group work and those taught through individual study. In doing this research, the researcher used intact group pretest and posttest design. There were two classes used in this research, VIII C was the experimental class 1 taught through group work and VIII D was the experimental class 2 taught through individual study. The sample was taken randomly through lottery. The treatments were administered in three meetings to both classes. The result showed that there was a significant difference of students? simple past tense achievement between those taught through group work and individual study. It can be seen from the difference of the students? mean score. The students? mean score of the experimental class 1 was 57,19 while the mean score of the posttest was 79,30. And the mean score of the pretest in the experimental class 2 was 59, 21 while the mean score of the posttest was 64,55. After comparing those results, it was found that although those teaching could give improvement to the students but teaching simple past tense through group work gave better result than individual study. Based on the data analysis at the significant level f 0.05, it proves that the students? scores were significantly different (p>0.05, p=0.000). So that the hypothesis proposed in this research was accepted. It means that there is significant difference of simple past tense achievement between students taught through group work and individual study. %D 2010 %C UNIVERSITAS LAMPUNG %I FAKULTAS KEGURUAN DAN ILMU PENDIDIKAN %L eprints15456