Examining Text Coherence in Graduate Students of English Argumentative Writing: Case Study

Abstract

This study aims at examining the writing skills of a group of Indonesian graduate students of English. A particular attention has been focused on the coherence of their production of argumentative texts. Employing a discourse analytical case study, three texts written by three Master’s degree students of the English language education at a local university in Central Java, Indonesia, were analyzed. Coherence and cohesion is inextricable in which both are crucial in academic writing as to achieve a makes-sense text. Therefore, it is an urgent need to look at the writing competency of students as they are at graduate level, majoring in the English language education. The texts produced by the students were scrutinized through the lens of micro- and macro-level coherence (Thornburry, 2005). From this theory, cohesion is involved in micro level coherence. The findings indicate that the students show a bit weakness on achieving coherent texts due to lack of optimization of cohesive devices especially conjunctions to create interconnectedness of the whole sentences in the texts.