Discourse Analysis of Grammatical Cohesive Devices

in Twelfth Grade Students’ Explanation Texts

Maulana Rizki
21200140000008
Introduction
1. Writing ability is one of the most important aspects for students, one of the indicators is to write using a
cohesive grammar that is good and correct.
2. Cohesion is very important in written discourse, the aim is none other than so that students are able to make
good and orderly texts.
3. The delivery of cohesion can be partly through grammar, partly through vocabulary, either lexical or
grammatical cohesion. several types of grammatical cohesion units including; references, substitutions,
ellipsis, and conjunctions.
4. According to Afriyanto (2017) studying and applying grammatical cohesion devices effectively will lead to
cohesion and improvement of the writings’ quality.
5. Explanation is written to explain how and why something in the world happens. It is about actions rather than
about things. Explanations play a valuable role in building and storing our knowledge. Technical and scientific
writing are often expressed in this form. The students should pay attention to every choice of words and also
details to make writing more lively and interesting.
6. In line with the background to the study, some relevant questions can be formulated as follows:
What kind of grammatical cohesive devices are found in the students‘ explanation text?
What are the mostly used grammatical cohesive devices in explanation text?
Literature Review
Explanation Text
Grammatical Cohesive
Devices on Students'
Explanation text is a text that has a social Explanation Text
function to explain the processes involved in
the formation or workings of natural or
sociocultural phenomena. This text has a Cohesion (Halliday
& Hasan: 1976)
general statement to position the reader and a
sequenced explanation of why or how
something occurs as the generic structure
Grammatical Lexical
(Gerot and Wignell: 1994). Cohesion Cohesion

Reference Substitution Ellipsis Conjunction

Methodology
1. The researcher uses descriptive and analytic method to explore students' knowledge and abilities in utilizing
grammatical cohesion devices in the explanation written texts.
2. The researcher installed the grammatical cohesion device of Halliday and Hasan's arrangement to examine
and explore the grammatical cohesion device used in explanation written texts.
3. The participants of this study were 45 students of twelfth grade of one of Senior High School Level.
Demographic data were self-reported by participants: 25 female participants and 20 male participants.
4. The stages of exploring the data are as follows: Adopted from Mr. Didin (2019)
1. Collecting data on students' writing assignments.
2. Calculate each grammatical cohesive aspect for each student's writing and enter it according to its
grouping in each table.
3. Naming the cohesive device through the formula :
Result and Discussion

From the 45 students’ explanation text, there are only 174 grammatical
cohesive items found in the students‘ explanation texts.
1. Reference (personal, demonstrative and comparative reference) with
94 (54.1%) times occurrences.
2. Conjunction (additive, adversative, causal, temporal) with 63 (36.2%)
occurrences.
3. Substitution (nominal, verbal and causal) 6 (3.4%) occurrences.
4. Ellipsis (nominal, verbal and causal) 2 (1.2%) occurrences.
Conclusion
This study aims to answer the two main question of the research, they are : What
kind of grammatical cohesive devices are found in the students‘ explanation text?
What are the mostly used grammatical cohesive devices in explanation text?

All the cohesive device are found in the students’ text. However, From all of those
devices, however, there are three cohesive devices that don‘t exist in students‘
explanation texts, those are verbal substitution, clausal substitution, and clausal
ellipsis. In addition, even though there are 3 cases of improper use of grammatical
cohesive devices such as the improper use of cohesive devices of it, their and
that. In general, the text written by students are not cohesively produced.