Abstract
It is important to keep the cohesion and coherence when writing; this is where the use of cohesive devices starts to be taken into account. This study sought the types of cohesive devices used by undergraduate students in their writing. The qualitative discourse analysis was used as the design of this research. The data were collected from seven undergraduate students as the respondents who were in the 6th semester at a private university in Aceh. These respondents were asked to write a descriptive text approximately 200 words in length and they were given forty-five minutes to finish their writing. The result unveiled that the type of cohesion devices which was majorly used was addition, as there are 94% of the additive device usage. Then, 75% refers to the use of cohesive devices as comparison, 56% as consequential, and 40% as temporal device. In can be concluded that the students use more addition in writing. As a suggestion, it is essential to shed light on their ability to employ cohesive devices more on other types in balance as it is necessary in contrasting, comparing, sequencing, giving exception, and illustrating.
Highlights
Writing is one of the skill which assist language learners to be command in foreign language, belonged to reading, speaking and listening as well
Measuring pupils writing ability is not easy; cohesive becomes one of elements which should be examined to compose an adequate piece of writing.According to Halliday and Hasan (1976) cohesion is a part of language system which exists in semantic part to clear up a meaning of the text
Cohesion belongs to discourse analysis text which link one word to another word to interpret the meaning of the text; one ties another to sum up the discourse within the text
Summary
ABSTRACT, I t is important to keep the cohesion and coherence when writing; this is where the use of cohesive devices starts to be taken into account. This study sought the types of cohesive devices used by undergraduate students in their writing. A good quality of the writing depends on a text; the words selected by the learners. This paper settled an objective to answer the following research question: what are the most common cohesive devices used by university students while writing English composition? To examine the quality of writing level, Halliday and Hasan (1976, 1985), mentioned five cohesive relations which connects the unity of the text, there are: reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical cohesion, and conjunction. (4) Homophora refers to elements outside of the text in the context of specific sense or lexical such as naming head of the country which called president or the only thing in the world which recognized by the entire creature. Example: I bought a new Honda which is the best brand of motorcycle.
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