An Analysis Of Cohesive Device In EFL Students' Essay Writing

Abstract

Students need to be able to make effective use of cohesive devices in order to produce high-quality essays. This research aimed to investigate the use of cohesive devices in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students‘ essay writing in the 2nd Semester of the English Language Department at a State University in North Sumatera. In detail, it was aimed to know the types of cohesive devices, the cohesiveness used of cohesive devices, and the causes of the students‘ committed incohesive writing. The method used in this research was qualitative content analysis and case study. The models used in data analysis were frequency count and content analysis by applying interactive model such as data collection, data condensation, data display, and conclusion. The essay writing was analyzed by the concept of cohesive devices that proposed by Halliday and Hasan and Halliday and Matthiessen. Whereas the interview is analyzed by Brown‘s framework. In this respect, the data sources of this research were essays and transcripts of interviews. Consequently, the analysis of this research consisted of two phases, textual analysis and interpretive interview. Furthermore, the research finding showed that reference (59%) was the predominant of grammatical cohesive device used by EFL students in essay writing compared to other types. Meanwhile, ellipsis (0.3%) was the lowest. Moreover, compared to other lexical cohesive devices, EFL students used repetition at the highest rate (89%) in their essay writing. The percentage of hyponyms used was the lowest (0.3%), however, meronyms did not appear in this research. The results demonstrate that students‘ overall attention to cohesive devices use in English essay writing was not particularly high, as they relied too much on certain types of cohesive devices. In addition, the students had sufficient knowledge to use the grammatical cohesive devices appropriately (990 data) compared to the incohesive use gained (105 data). Whereas in terms of lexical cohesive devices all the phrases are cohesive. In this sense, the causes of the students committed incohesive writing interference from their mother tongue and overgeneralization. Meanwhile, the context of learning was not identified