An Analysis of Lexical Cohesion on the Students’ Writing

Usman Sidabutar

doi:10.36655/jetal.v2i2.533

Abstract

This research aims at finding lexical cohesion in high and low-graded lexical cohesion types on the students' narrative writing. The researcher wants to reveal the reasons why the writing problems exist in lexical cohesion and also to find out what way that the students will use to solve the lexical types in writing narrative text. The present research uses the types of lexical cohesion as proposed by Halliday and Matthiensen (2014). The lexical cohesion items consist of repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy. The data of this research are derived from students' writing through writing research papers. This research was conducted in qualitative. The results show that repetition becomes the highest occurrence in the students' writing as there are 240 occurrences (64%) in total types of lexical. Nevertheless, the least kind of lexical cohesion is hyponymy. There are only 20 occurrences (6, 6%). It can be seen that the meaning relation in the text occurs among the six types of lexical cohesion to make cohesive text. Besides that, the context of the text itself also refers to coherent text. It means that the text should consist of interrelated sentences to achieve good unity. Both are related to each other in creating well-structured text. The students were sometimes difficult to connect one word with other words. There might be a reluctance of translating the classification of the real words of EFL. Pedagogically, the students need to get studying vocabularies professionally to upgrade the stage of English into an advanced level especially in teaching English writing ability. It was recommended to teachers or lecturers to take an in-depth look at the EFL learners' problems in writing English more than and the English lecturers practice the prompt way to master vocabulary as the core of enhancing the writing quality

Highlights

English to its importance brings to the international language of English learning
The type of lexical cohesion which focuses on preparing students for all types of writing needed in the studying of their academic subjects may be classified as the instruction of English for Academic Purposes (EAP)
It is advised that the students should master the competencies namely lexical cohesion for writing kinds of text

Summary

Introduction

English to its importance brings to the international language of English learning. It is an alternative language to communicate or interact with others from different countries which has the national language as well as various kinds of traditional languages; Indonesia is one of the countries which had learned English.Writing an essay in a foreign language can be a difficult task for some EFL students. English to its importance brings to the international language of English learning. In Indonesia, researches into EFL learners' writing exposed that students find some problems when transfer ideas from L1 to L2 because of dissimilarities rules between Bahasa Indonesia and English, and the lack of knowledge and linguistic structures in English (Ariyanti, 2016; Rahmatunisa, 2014). These problems affect some EFL students have lack writing performance with the result that their writing becomes obstinate, and hard to take the information and catch the meaning of their writing

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion