Cohesion in English Narratives Produced by Seventh Semester Students Academic Year 2010-2011, Majoring in Linguistics at the English Department, the Faculty of Letters – Jember University: A Study of Student’s Narrative Writing

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine the cohesion used by seventh semester students, academic year 2010- 2011, English Department, Faculty of Letters, Jember University. It is conducted to elucidate what cohesive devices are used in their narrative texts, to analyze texture in texts, and to reveal the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality of the students’ text. This study employs both qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative method is applied to describe the data in the form sentences of narrative text and quantitative one is used to count the cohesive devices elements applied in this study as the method of collecting data. The result of this thesis presents that the texts in the first topic ACCIDENT produce a greater number of coherence more than the other topic. The incoherent texts occur mostly in HOLIDAY topic. It presents five incoherent texts among twelve texts. Moreover, FREE topic shows that there are three incoherent texts among eight texts. The texts within three topics apply incorrect grammatical sentence structure. Moreover, there are underused of substitutions and failure in presenting ellipsis as part of grammatical cohesive devices. By using basic percentage counting, the percentages of coherence in each topic are gained. The texts in accident topic present coherence texts. The highest percentage of coherence in accident topic is 87%. Holiday topic presents twelve texts that five texts are considered as incoherent textswith 33 % as the lowest percentage among twelve texts. Free topic presents that there are three texts among eight texts are considered as incoherent texts as well as the lowest percentage is 28 % and the highest percentage is 74%. The incorrect and inappropriate application of cohesive devices and grammatical structurein the seventh semester students’ texts may create misunderstanding and ambiguities for the readers if the readers do not understand the context of situation.