Exploring Cohesive Devices on the Abstracts of Undergraduate Thesis
Written by English Language Teaching Department Students of IAIN Syekh
Nurjati Cirebon in October 2016
(Qualitative Research)
MOH. CHAERUL ANWAR:
Language is the main factor of communication between people with
others. Communication between people with others through language can be
delivered in two ways, spoken language and written language. One form of
written language that is useful to convey knowledge to the people is discourse.
Written discourse can be formed like a thesis. Thesis is a scientific writing based
on the student’s research. One of the important parts of thesis is abstract. Abstract
is the summary of the thesis. In a discourse, there are many sentences which have
to be united and hang together. The discourse is able to have good unity in
connecting between sentences with the help of cohesive devices. Cohesive
devices represent cohesive relation.
This study aims (1) to find out the types of cohesive devices are
commonly used on the abstracts, (2) to describe the usage of cohesive devices are
used on the abstract.
The study is designed as qualitative research. The data is taken from
ten selected randomly undergraduate thesis abstracts written by English Language
Teaching Department students of IAIN Syekh Nurjati Cirebon published in
October 2016. The technique of collecting data is documentation. The writer is as
the instrument of research. Then, the technique of analysis is content analysis
based on the theory of Halliday and Hasan (1976) of cohesive devices.
The findings show that several cohesive devices found on
undergraduate thesis abstracts including grammatical and lexical cohesion. The
type of conjunction is commonly used on the abstracts. The number of
conjunction is 112 or 45% from all cohesive devices found. The use of cohesive
devices that are found on the thesis abstracts connects one sentence with the other
sentence.
Keywords: thesis, abstract, discourse analysis, cohesive devices
