AN ANALYSIS ON COHESION WITHIN SOPHOMORE STUDENTS’ ESSAY WRITINGS

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AN ANALYSIS ON COHESION WITHIN SOPHOMORE STUDENTS’ ESSAY WRITINGS

Ariffah Nourma Juwita, Ratri Budiwati, Lina Ambarwati

arifanourma@gmail.com, ratri.budiwati@gmail.com, ambarwati111@gmail.com

Yogyakarta State University

Abstract 

Writing an essay is commonly used as a means to assess students’ academic competence. It can also be used to measure students’ higher-level thinking skills, such as synthesizing, analyzing, evaluating, or solving a particular problem. A good essay conveys interrelated ideas which are developed systematically and cohesively through the use of cohesive devices within texts. In response to that, this study tried to reveal the variety of cohesive devices used by students and their tendencies in using the devices in their essays. The study used a descriptive quantitative approach. The samples comprised 30 expository essays written by sophomore students majoring in English Education at Yogyakarta State University. The data was then analyzed by using a cohesion model adapted from Halliday & Hasan (1976) and Halliday (2014). The results of the study described how the cohesive resources explored by the students and what the favorable & less-favorable resources were.

Keywords:  cohesion, cohesive devices, sophomore students, essay writing

INTRODUCTION 

In the academic field, an essay plays important roles within teaching and learning process. As defined by Folse et al. (2010, p. 199), an essay is a collection of paragraphs consisting of the writer’s opinions or ideas, or facts, on a particular topic. It has become a common assignment for students—especially for higher level ones—, both for practicing their writing and thinking skills as well as their comprehensions on subjects taught in the class. It also assesses students’ achievement in learning a particular language in the class. These become the reasons why this type of writing is categorized as academic writing by Brown (2004). In his book, Language Assessment; Principles and Classroom Practices, an essay is one of the extensive types of writing performance. There are some requirements students need to fulfil in producing a writing at this level; they are required to attain an objective of the writing, organize and develop their ideas into logical sequences, provide details to support or illustrate their ideas, and demonstrate “syntactic and lexical variety” (Brown, 2004, p. 220).

Considering the complexity of the writing, an essay, therefore, requires students to deal with linguistic features to be able to deliver their ideas in well-constructed sets of paragraphs. One of the features prior to such text construction is cohesion. Halliday and Hasan (1976, p. 4) defines the term cohesion as “relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text”. The sense of cohesion is that some element in a text is dependent on each other; one part will refer to the others existing in the text, making it possible to comprehend a text wholly because of the integration of the elements. This is crucial in an essay writing since the text is essentially linear, meaning that it offers only one topic at a time. Therefore, in writing an essay students have to present ideas in a logical order to be easily understood.

To achieve cohesion in an essay writing, several cohesive devices can be implemented in the text. In English writings, there are reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and other lexical-based devices such as synonymy, repetition, hyponymy, and meronymy that can be utilized by students. Each of them has different contribution in realizing the unification of a text, and thus exploring their usage in the text contributes to the quality of writings (Adas, 2012). However, majority of students, especially those who are L2 learners of English, are often unaware with this; they tend to prioritize in structuring a single sentence in a correct form based on the tense used, or dealing with vocabularies to fill in the text, without much concerning about the way they structure their ideas in paragraphs cohesively and coherently (Shuang-Mei, 2009). As the results, students prefer to rely to one or two types of cohesive devices only and overuse them rather than exploring the others. Such situation may result in a lack of qualification essay writing (Zhang, 2000).

Considering their significance, students need to be made clear on using cohesive devices in their essay writings. This is especially the case when it comes to students learning English language in the class. In the researchers’ context, the issue is particularly crucial for those who are learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and majoring English language education, to top it off. Because they are prepared to be future English teachers, the concept of cohesion and how it is explored in the writing should be understood clearly. Still in the researchers’ context, the students in their second year start to be given exposures to such writings—usually in writing for academic assignments class—for they are prepared to be able to accomplish typical assignments in the next level. Therefore, to find out the way sophomore students using cohesive devices in their essays, this study proposes the following research questions:

1.       What are the varieties of cohesive devices used by sophomore students in their essays?

2.       What are their tendencies in using the cohesive devices in writing essays?

A content analysis was then conducted to investigate this issue. Using Halliday and Hasan’s framework, a number of essay writings produced by sophomore students majoring English Education in Yogyakarta State University as the sample of the research were analyzed.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 

1.                   Cohesion

The concept of cohesion is in the semantic level (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). It means that it refers to relations of meaning that exist within a text. Adas (2012) mentions that cohesion is the realization of employing explicit linguistic devices to signal semantic relations between one element to another in a particular text.

To achieve such interrelation, cohesion is implemented in a text through the grammar and vocabulary aspects. Therefore, Halliday and Hasan (1976) divides it into two categories: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion is realized through the use of reference, ellipsis, substitution, and conjunction (Halliday and Hasan, 1976), while lexical cohesion is achieved through repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation (Halliday, 2014). They are popularly known as cohesive devices.

2.                   Cohesive Devices

In achieving cohesion in a text, some verbs, pronouns, or any linguistic feature that become the ‘ties’ that connect one sentence to another, one clause to another, that relate to one particular thing in a sentence to the other in another sentence, that refer back to the ideas mentioned before, and so on, help in unifying the text as a whole entity. These ‘ties’ are called as cohesive devices. Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Halliday (2014) proposed the following types of cohesive devices, or in their term, ‘cohesive ties’, to pursue that goal.

a.                   Reference

Reference is the sign of retrieval. It refers to the element of a text that occurs previously, or subsequently. The way each element of a text is related to each other through reference is determined in two senses—the one which is related to the text itself and the other that is referred out of the text. They are called as endophora and exophora respectively. In exophora, the relation of the different ‘dimensions’ can only be defined by operating somebody’s general knowledge and sense. On the other hand, in endophora, the meaning-level relation is achieved by identifying any interrelation found in the text. The relation can be in two forms: anaphoric relation refers one element to the one existing before it, and cataphoric relation refers one element to the one existing after it. As the researchers are interested in investigating texts exclusively, exophora is excluded because it does not give contributions in unifying the units of meaning in a text (Mehamsadji, 1988).

This type of cohesion is then categorized into personal reference, demonstrative reference, and comparative reference (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Personal reference is reference that indicates the category of person (I, me, you, we, us, she, her, he, him, they, them, it, one, mine, yours, ours, his, hers, theirs, its, my, your, our, their, one’s). Demonstrative reference is reference by means of location (this, these, that, those, here, there, the). Comparative reference is indirect reference by means of identity or similarity (same, identical, identically, equal, similar, similarly, additional, other, otherwise, different, differently, else, better, more, likewise, so, such, less, equally).

b.                  Substitution

Substitution devices supply the appropriate word or words already available (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Mehamsadji, 1988). Because it occurs in nominal, verbal, and clausal strata, substitution is then divided into nominal substitution (one, ones, same), verbal substitution (do), and clausal substitution (so, not).

c.                   Ellipsis

Ellipsis is called as ‘substitution by zero’ for its nature of omitting some elements, but the things being omitted still can be understood. Instead of a whole structure of sentences, ellipsis simplifies the parts that can be understood even if they are left unwritten. The same as substitution, ellipsis is divided into nominal ellipsis (each, every, all, both, any, either, no, neither, some, other, another, different, identical, usual, regular, certain, odd, famous, well-known, typical, obvious, cheaper, best, etc.), verbal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis.

d.                  Conjunction

The function of conjunction is rather different with the previous grammatical cohesive devices. It relates to other linguistic elements that occur in a text without being bent by the elements. There are four types of conjunction, such as: additive conjunction (and, and also, nor, not, or, or else, furthermore, in addition, alternatively, by the way, that is, in other words, thus, likewise, similarly, on the other hand, etc.), adversative conjunction (yet, though, only, but, however, nevertheless, despite this, actually, in fact, instead, rather, in any case, anyhow, etc.), temporal conjunction (then, next, after that, just then, at the same time, first, etc.), and causal conjunction (so, then, hence, therefore, etc.).

e.                   Lexical Cohesion

Different with the previous devices which are grammatical based, lexical cohesion is achieved through vocabulary elements in the text. Halliday (2014) proposes the devices of lexical cohesion in forms of repetition (repetition of a lexical item), synonymy (equal meanings), hyponymy (attribution/classification), meronymy (sense of ‘be a part of’), and collocation (a tendency of particular associated lexical items to co-occur). However, collocation has posed a lot of problems; even Hasan (1981) experienced the problem in analyzing it herself. Collocation also tends to lead to subjectivity (Mehamsadji, 1988); therefore, this type of lexical cohesion is omitted in this analysis, leaving only repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy as the lexical devices used to conduct the analysis.

In this study, the researchers adapted Halliday and Hasan’s framework in determining the cohesive devices, and thus based the analysis on it due to the completion and compactness it possesses in the field of cohesion analysis. Grammatical cohesive devices were adapted from Halliday and Hasan’s book ‘Cohesion in English’ (1976) while the lexical cohesive devices were obtained from Halliday’s book which had been revised by Matthiesen (2014), Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar.

3.                   Cohesion in an Essay Writing

Cohesion indeed plays an important role in any text. In a written text, it helps the reader in constructing the meaning from the text and the writer in creating one that can be easily comprehended (Cox, et al. in Palmer, 1999). Therefore, more or less cohesion contributes in determining the quality of a text. This also works in an essay writing which is also considered as a text—the written one. Crossley and McNamara (2010) states that there is a relation between the quality of an essay with the cohesion, and coherence, realised in the writing. This fact is, however, still debatable due to different findings found by researchers on the role of cohesion in affecting the writing quality. In his study, Zhang (2000) found that there was no significant relationship between the number of cohesive devices used and the quality of writing. A study on 120 argumentative essays conducted by McCulley (1985) also revealed that writing quality does not correlate with the total number of cohesive devices used in the essays. However, in the same study, it was found that there was a positive correlation between writing quality and specific cohesive devices including demonstratives, nominal substitution and ellipsis, repetition, synonymy, hyponymy and collocation. It appears that cohesive density—the number of cohesive devices—being utilized in a text does not give proper contributions to the quality of the writing. Instead, the quality tends to be fulfilled by properly exploring the types of cohesive devices.  This is supported by Zhang (2000) that indicates that overuse on several cohesive device types only has negative effects on the quality of writing. Therefore, cohesive diversity is much more preferred to improve the quality of students’ writings, especially their essay writings.

4.                   Cohesive Devices in L2 Essay Writing

Similar to the debatable findings on the effect of the cohesion role in determining students’ writing quality, findings of whether there is a difference in the use of cohesive devices in essay writings between L1 students (native students) and L2 students (EFL students) are also controversial ones. Even though there might not be any significant difference in the number of cohesive devices used between L1 and L2 students as Connor (1984) and Johnson (1992) in Alarcon and Morales (2011) revealed in their studies, there are different tendencies shown by L1 and L2 students in utilizing each type of cohesive devices in their essay writings—some of them are preferable than the others for L1 students, and some others are for the L2 ones. Connor (1984) revealed that L2 learners tend to lack lexical variety but use high numbers of repetition and conjunction. On the other hand, L1 students show a lower percentage of the use of repetition.

METHODOLOGY

The sample of this study involved 30 essays written by sophomore students majoring English Education at Yogyakarta State University. Random sampling technique was used in choosing the sample from the total 70 essays written as the assignments of Writing for Academic Assignments class. The essays chosen were categorized as comparison & contrast essays and cause & effect essays.

The research design was a descriptive quantitative research design so that it tried to answer the research questions in a form of percentages. The procedure of this research was conducted by doing the following steps: 1.) the researchers collected the texts and compiled them into one bundle; each text was ordered by giving ‘Text 1’ for the first text, and then ‘Text 2’ for the second text, ‘Text 3’ for the following text, and so on until it reached ‘Text 30’; 2.) the researchers with total number of 3 people analyzed the text in terms of the cohesive devices used by marking each cohesive devices with different codes; R1 for personal reference, R2 for demonstrative reference, R3 for comparative reference, S1 for nominal substitution, S2 for verbal substitution, S3 for clausal substitution, E1 for nominal ellipsis, E2 for verbal ellipsis, E3 for clausal ellipsis, C1 for additive conjunction, C2 for adversative conjunction, C3 for temporal conjunction, C4 for causal conjunction, L1 for repetition, L2 for synonymy, L3 for hyponymy, and L4 for meronymy; 3.) the number of each category of cohesive devices found were then written in the instrument to find the total number of the overall cohesive devices found in the texts; and 4.) the data was calculated computationally to find out the frequencies of each type of cohesive devices as well as finding out the highest and lowest numbers of cohesive device types found in the texts.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 

1.                   Types of Cohesive Devices Students Use

Kinds of Grammatical Cohesive Devices	Frequency	Percentage
Reference	1844	66%
Subtitution	15	1%
Ellipsis	32	1%
Conjunction	904	32%
Total	2795	100%

Table 1. Frequencies and percentages of grammatical cohesive devices used by students

Kinds of Lexical Cohesive Devices	Frequency	Percentage
Repetition	1743	81%
Synonymy	65	3%
Hyponymy	280	13%
Meronymy	61	3%
Total	2149	100%

Table 2. Frequencies and percentages of lexical cohesive devices used by students

From the tables above, it can be clearly seen that students appear to have explored all of the cohesive devices proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Halliday (2014), both grammatical and lexical ones. Grammatical cohesive devices are explored by students more often than the lexical ones.

2.                   Types of Cohesive Devices Preferable to Students

Chart 1 exhibits students’ preferences in exploring grammatical cohesive devices in their writings. Reference becomes the grammatical cohesive devices mostly used by them (66%), while substitution becomes the least (1%) with total frequency as 15. Conjunction in the second place also occurs frequently (32%). However, becomes the third preferable cohesive devices, ellipsis only occurs for 1% with total frequency as 32.

Chart 1. Frequencies and percentages of types of reference used by students

Furthermore, amongst the types of reference, demonstrative reference has the highest percentage of the others (54%). The use of demonstrative reference in the text can be seen as “Also, you can train dogs to do tricks when commanded. Some of the most commonly seen tricks in dogs are roll over, fetch, shake hands, sit down, lay down, and play dead.” The word ‘the’ in the sentence above refers to the ‘tricks’ that occurred in the previous sentence.

Chart 2. Frequencies and percentages of types of conjunction used by students

As the second preferable cohesive devices used by students, there is, however, a great disparity in each type of conjunction itself. From the chart above it can be seen that additive conjunction dominates the kind of conjunction used with the percentage of 69%. The example of the analysis of additive conjunction can be seen from the following sentence: “Narcotics are substances or drugs derived from plants or not the plant, systematic or synthesis, which can decrease or change in consciousness, loss of taste, relieve pain and can lead to dependence.”

Chart 3. Frequencies and percentages of types of ellipsis used by students

With a great gap with the previous cohesive device types, ellipsis becomes the third cohesive device preferred to use by students. Nominal ellipsis becomes the dominant type of ellipsis mostly explored, which can be seen in sentence “Both the book and the movie gain people attention since the story is interesting. … Although the differences are not making the story going bad, both are still amusing.” The word ‘both’ as a form of ellipsis omitting ‘the book and the movie’ (“… both book and movie are still amusing.”) in the second sentence for it has been made clear of the previous sentence that it is discussing a book and a movie.

Table 4. Frequencies and percentages of types of substitution used by students

As the least preferred by students, substitution only gains 15 pieces in total amongst 30 essays available. Nominal substitution gains 40%, the highest among the others. This kind of substitution is realized through sentence “In other words, such conjunctions as “so” and “but” can only be studied within a pragmatic framework rather than semantic one (Blakemore, 2002).” It shows how the word ‘one’ substitutes the word ‘framework’ in the same sentence.

Ellipsis and substitution are, however, considered to be closely related and can sometimes hard to tell from each other for their similar nature of substituting some information of an element of the text. Ellipsis is even often called as ‘substitution by zero’, and thus in the analyzed students’ writings, they share the same percentage (1%) of the total numbers.

Chart 5. Frequencies and percentages of types of lexical cohesion used by students

           

Furthermore, as suggested from chart 5 it can be seen that repetition becomes the most lexical cohesive device students commonly used, followed by hyponymy, synonymy, and meronymy. The analysis of each type of lexical cohesive devices can be seen as below:

Repetition: “These different worlds are similar in some ways, but they differ in many ways, especially in the student’s life.”

Synonymy: “Semantics studies the meaning that words and certain combinations of words old for both the speaker and listener. Pragmatics deals with how the context in which words are used can dictate their true meaning at that particular time.”

Hyponymy: “Netbooks and laptops have many of the feature and characteristics because they are basically two portable computers.

Meronymy: “Nikon used to have only autofocus in the body.

In repetition, some lexical items are repeated over and over again throughout the text. The way they are repeated is not always necessarily in the same form (can be in forms of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or nouns). This is different with synonymy that has the nature of repetition in terms of the meaning but it changes the word. The word “studies” and “deals” in the example of the analysis above have the same essence of meaning. In the analysis of hyponymy, “netbooks” and “laptops” are the subordinate of “portable computers”, which means that netbooks and laptops are the kinds of portable computers. Meronymy has a similar tendency in hyponymy in terms of superordinate-and-subordinate relationships of the related lexical items, but with a slightly different essence; rather than in a “kind of” relation, hyponymy tends to be “a part of”. In the analysis, autofocus is considered to be the part of Nikon camera body.

3.                   Discussion

There are some issues worth-discussed based on the findings presented above. From the very first point, that is, the cohesive devices students used in their writings, it appears that there is a great gap between the proposed types, showing that students tend to use reference and conjunction as the grammatical cohesive devices and repetition as the lexical cohesive device to build cohesion in their writings abundantly. The former two devices take up 98% of the whole grammatical cohesive devices, while the rest devices, ellipsis and substitution, become the minorities. This is similar to Connor’s (1984) findings on the grammatical cohesive device mostly used by L2 students, that is, conjunction. Even though it is placed as the second, but the high frequency shows that this category is still L2 students’ preferred grammatical cohesive device. In this study, the higher use of reference than conjunction might be understood from the types of the writings (comparison/contrast and cause-effect essays) that require students to refer to the same things over and over again throughout the texts—mainly to compare one thing to the others.

As for lexical cohesive devices, repetition is used excessively in the texts, followed by synonymy and the minorities—hyponymy and meronymy. This also corresponds with Connor’s (1984) findings on lexical cohesion L2 students mostly used, that is, repetition. The tendency in using this lexical cohesive device might result from some causes which need a further investigation, such as lacking adequate vocabulary mastery. Because students tend to develop their essays through this device in achieving lexical cohesion, hyponymy and meronymy have not properly explored by them. As a form of omission of particular information in some parts of a text, ellipsis is not quite preferred by students possibly due to their tendencies to explain every idea as clear as possible in their writings. Similarly, students’ tendency in using repetition excessively more or less explains the lowest percentage substitution perceived among the other lexical cohesive devices in the texts.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION

From the discussions above, it can be concluded that students have utilized all kind of cohesive devices proposed by Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halliday’s (2014) framework in their essay writings, with reference and repetition as the mostly used grammatical cohesive device and lexical cohesive device respectively, while substitution and meronymy as the least used grammatical cohesive device and lexical cohesive device respectively. Some cohesive devices are, however, overused by students in their writings, such as reference, conjunction, and repetition, while the others tend to be neglected. This unbalanced proportion may affect their attempt to achieve the cohesive writing in their essays. Some misused cohesive devices found by the researchers in some parts of the texts can result in the shift of meanings and thus may as well affect their writing quality

In response to that, the researchers suggest that it is important for teachers, lecturers, or other practitioners to emphasise the theory of cohesion in writing (Liu & Braine, 2005). Students need to be made clear of the use of each type of cohesive devices and how they are explored through the text. Students can also be given more exposures to the less-explored cohesive devices so that they can produce an essay writing with cohesive density as well as rich cohesive variety, more importantly. This is especially the case for those majoring English study program.

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This paper was presented in "The 5th Undergraduate Conference on ELT, Linguistics, and Literature" held by English Language Education Study Program of Sanata Dharma University in 2017.