Francis Mae N.

Manguilimotan

ENG109 (B3)

A Summary on ‘THE ANALYSIS OF COHESIVE DEVICES IN STUDENTS’ WRITING

DISCUSSION TEXT’ by Nurhaeda Gailea, Syafrizal, and Ai Hafipah (2018)

This research paper aims to identify the various cohesive devices found in select
students’ writing forms. The researchers also further investigated the frequency of these cohesive
devices, their contribution to the student’s constructed texts, the difficulty the students’ faced
with the utilization of these devices, and the extent of the student’s cohesion level with the
discussion texts through the chosen study site, SMAN 1 Pandeglang. Fifteen (15) students were
selected as respondents for the study. The paper employed a qualitative research design with a
content analysis lens to further examine the students’ discussion texts. The reason why
discussion texts were chosen for the subject of the study is that through examining the structure
of the texts, students can express ideas in writing with cohesive and coherent sentences. In
addition, the concept of cohesive devices proposed by Halliday (2014) is utilized in analyzing
the data of the study.

Cohesion takes place when the semantic interpretation of a linguistic element in the
discourse depends on another and can be established through various means. Cohesive devices
consist of five types such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.
Based on the classification of the sub-categories by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014, p. 601)
reference can be grouped into four categories: pronominal, demonstrative, definite article „the‟,
and comparative. Substitution has been classified into four subcategories, too: one/some/ones (as
substitutes of noun phrases), do so/it/that (as substitutes of the predicate), here/there/then (as
substitutes of adverbials), and finally so/not (as substitutes of clauses). Ellipsis has been divided
into three subcategories: noun phrases, predication, and a clause. The fourth is the conjunction,
which can be subcategorized into five: additive, adversative, causative, temporal, and
continuative. Conclusively, lexical cohesion contains six subcategories: antonymy, repetition,
synonymy, meronymy, hyponymy, and collocation.
 The study only found 3 types of cohesive devices, and these are reference, conjunction,
and lexical cohesion. The most frequently used cohesive device is reference with 50.44% usage
of the total cohesive devices. Conjunction however has a usage rate of 29.41%. All subtypes of
lexical cohesion are found in the students’ discussion texts with repetition as the most used
subtype. The paper concluded that it may be so because of the students’ lack of vocabulary so
that they tend to use the same words instead of using synonyms, antonymy, meronymy, etc.
Students did not use other types of cohesive devices with the reason being that they do not seem
familiar with the different types of cohesive devices so they only utilized the ones that they are
familiar with. In conclusion, the results of the study found that the students only know three
types of cohesive devices, and these are reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. They
overuse some cohesive devices while ignoring the others. It is observed that students do
understand how to write coherent discussion texts, however, their lack of knowledge in using
cohesive devices appropriately is shown to obstruct their writing capabilities resulting in their
written texts being difficult to understand. Their lack of competence in using cohesive devices is
one of the main causes.
Reference: Gailea, N., Syafrizal, S., & Hafipah, A. (2018). THE ANALYSIS OF COHESIVE
DEVICES IN STUDENTS’WRITING DISCUSSION TEXT. The Journal of English Literacy
Education: The Teaching and Learning of English as a Foreign Language, 5(2), 88-98.