THE USE OF COHESIVE DEVICES IN TEXTS ACROSS GENRES: A CASE STUDY OF STUDENTS AT AN ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE PROGRAM

ABSTRACT The Use of Cohesive Devices in Texts across Genres: A Case Study of Students at an English Language and Literature Program Mery Nur Andini (1400918) Main Supervisor : Wawan Gunawan, M.Ed.St., Ph.D. Second Supervisor : Dr. Ruswan Dallyono This study aims to investigate the types of cohesive devices in students’ texts across genres at an English Language and Literature Program. The use of cohesive devices has been a significant idea in Discourse Analysis, especially for writing a text. The data were collected from five students who have passed Writing for General Communication courses in the first and second semester. The total number of the text was twenty five. The theoretical framework of Halliday and Hasan (1976), Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), and Martin and Rose (2008) were used to identify the types of cohesive devices and their function in the texts. The analysis was conducted through a qualitative research method. The findings show that both grammatical and lexical cohesive devices were found in the students’ texts. For the grammatical cohesive devices, personal reference ‘I’ (2.56%),demonstrative ‘the’ (4%), and comparative ‘more’ (0.6%) are the most frequently used. Meanwhile, ‘and’ (2.31%) and ‘but’ (0.68%) are the most written conjunctions. The least used grammatical cohesive devices in the texts are ellipsis (0.02%) and substitution (0.01%). Meanwhile, for lexical cohesive devices, repetition (0.21%), meronymy (0.19%), hyponymy (0.14%), and collocation (1.23%) constantly appear in the texts. ‘I’ is used to represent first personal reference. Demonstrative ‘the’ refers to familiarity of things or events. ‘More’ is used for showing a particular quality is stronger than others. Conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’for saying additional information and opposite ideas. Ellipsis and substituion are for avoiding the redundancy of verbs, nouns, or clauses. The function of of lexical cohesive devices (repetition, hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation) is to minimize the monotony of language. Based on the analysis, the present study confirms the findings of Afrianto (2017) and Mankevych (2016) which state that ellipsis and substitution, as the grammatical cohesive devices, are not used regularly by students. Additionally, the findings of the present study prove that the use of cohesive devices take a crucial part in the process of writing in order to keep semantic relations in a text. Keywords: cohesive devices, grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion, tex