Grammatical cohesion in students’ writing

ABSTRACT

Writing is one of skill courses that have to be mastered by students in learning language. A good writing must be cohesive and coherent in order to be understandable for the readers. Therefore this study is about grammatical cohesion in student’s writing. The goals of this study are to know what types of grammatical cohesion are used in students’ writing and what the function of each grammatical cohesion device used in students’ writing. Moreover, it is aimed to know how frequent and what common grammatical devices that used by the students. The data are gained from each word that includes grammatical cohesion that is taken from English department students’s writing in third years who took writing III course in Maulana Malik Ibrahim State Islamic University of Malang. In analyzing the data, the researcher uses Halliday’s theory of cohesion which includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. The method of this study is qualitative and quantitative research method.

The result of this study shows that all of types of grammatical cohesion used in their writing. The most frequent type of grammatical cohesion is reference, followed by conjunction. Substitution and ellipsis are less used since both of them are commonly used in the form of conversation or dialog. It is remarked that in each type of grammatical cohesive devices used there is always a predominant device. For reference, it functions as referring devices in textual environment. Substitution function is for replacing an item with another word or phrase. It is for avoiding repetition and ambiguity in the text. Ellipsis functions as omission an item with certain word from surface text but it can still be understood. Conjunction functions to make the text more organized and varied.

Hopefully, by analyzing grammatical cohesion used in students' writing, it can improve the knowledge of cohesion applied in this study. Therefore for the next researcher who takes the same topic is expected to do it better and more complete by using other subject such as spoken text or use other theory of cohesion.