Quality of the discourse developed by the participants of ‘Java Overland English Debate 2007’

Language is a meaningful sound. It is used as the medium of conversation. Thus, studying conversation is not only interesting, but also meaningful. Because of that, the researcher interested in studying that conversation through the discourse analysis. The problem statements that will be answered by this research are about the quality of discourse that are included the coherence, the cohesiveness, and the intertextuality developed by the participants in ‘Java Overland English Debate 2007’.

The discourse in this research is a text in on going speaking that consists of sentences expressed by the participants in English debate. The elements that must be required in this discourse are cohesive, coherence, and intertextuality.

Then, the research design of this research is qualitative descriptive. The data source of this research is taken from ‘Java Overland English Debate 2007’. And then, this research uses cassette and tape recorder as the instruments. The process of data gathering in this research is by recording all of the debate. Then, the data analysis is started by transcribing the data onto paper and followed by managing the data. The third process of the analysis is finding the data which one is coherent, cohesive and how about the intertextuality. After that this findings are summarized and finished by making conclusion.

From the research process, is found that quality of the discourse developed by the participants of ‘Java Overland English Debate 2007’ has fulfilled all of the criteria of good discourse. Most of them can produce sentences in well construction. The strength of that discourse is in the intertextuality. All of the participants have a good knowledge about the topic. Their reasons or arguments are relevant with other text and that is right base on the reality. Then in the coherence, each of statements is interpretable and has relation with other statements. Then the weakness of that discourse is on the cohesiveness. The participant often make mistake in making sentences, either in the grammaticality or in using cohesive devices or coherence, they seldom make mistakes.