The cohesion and coherence of thesis abstracts written by students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang

ABSTRACT

Making a good abstract in fact is not an easy thing for most students in university. It is proven by the reality that majority of students’ abstracts found around are not well arranged, or in another word, they are not cohesive and coherent. What makes them not coherent among others is because the students only ‘put’ and ‘stick’ the information in their abstracts irregularly without thinking whether their ideas have been coherently linked each other or not. Not only that, most students also pay no attention to the meaning relationship of their sentences so that it makes their readers difficult to get the idea. Knowing that this phenomenon often happens, and many students still do the same mistakes, the researcher finally feels interested to conduct a research on cohesion and coherence of thesis abstracts, which are written by students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang.

In this research, there are two main problems that are investigated by the researcher, they are: (1) what are the types of cohesive and coherent devices used by the students of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang in their abstracts? and (2) how are the cohesion and coherence of the abstracts?

Additionally, in conducting this research, the researcher uses a descriptive qualitative research method to analyze the data. The data are taken from the words, phrase, clause, sentence, or paragraphs containing the types and the violations of cohesive and coherent devices. Furthermore, in collecting the data, the researcher does several steps. First, she read the whole thesis abstracts written by the students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. Second, she continued with observing the thesis abstracts written by the linguistic students of English Letters and Language Department of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang, while those that are written by the literature students are not observed. After observing the linguistic thesis abstracts, the researcher continued with selecting the up to ones. Next, the researcher read the whole up to date thesis selected from those written by the linguistic students and then took notes on the types and violations of cohesion and coherence found. The last, the researcher classifies the data based on their types and then analyze them by using the theory of cohesion by Halliday and Hassan (1976) and coherence by Oshima and Hogue (1983).

Based on the data analyzed, it is found that the students use both grammatical and lexical cohesive devices, such as repetition, ellipsis, conjunction, repetition, and synonym, hyponym, and collocation, while the rest of the cohesive devices such as substitution, antonym, and metonym are not used. Not only that, the researcher also found that the most widely used cohesive device is reference. In addition, besides the cohesive devices, the researcher found coherent devices as well, which cover the use repetition of keywords and a pronoun, the use of transition signals, and the logical order of ideas. At the same time, in the abstracts analyzed, the researcher also found a lot of violations in terms of cohesive and coherent devices. In terms of cohesion, the researcher found the violation of reference, substitution, conjunction, synonym, and antonym. In terms of coherence, the researcher found the inappropriate use of pronoun, transitional signals, and illogic order. The violations of cohesion and coherence that have the highest occurrence in the abstracts are reference and logical order. Those are the things that make the sentences and paragraphs in the abstract could not cohesive and coherent as a whole.

To sum up, based on the violations that occur, the researcher concludes that there is none of the abstracts analyzed is united as a full text. This happens because the violations of cohesion and coherence are always found in the abstracts so that make the sentences and paragraphs within the abstracts are less cohesive and not coherent.

Finally, after conducting this research, the researcher hopes to the next researcher of the similar study to analyze other students’ academic writings, such those found in Writing class so that they can find more various patterns of sentences and paragraphs with more cohesive and coherent devices.