The Adoption of Cohesive Devices (CDs) in Indonesian Students of EFL’s Opinion Essays

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the types of cohesive devices (CDs) and the errors in using cohesive devices (CDs) in opinion essays made by the Indonesian students of EFL.The subjects were twenty-six (26) undergraduate program students of EFL enrolled in an Argumentative writing class. To get the data, they were asked to write an opinion essay which consists of five paragraphs (including introductory and concluding paragraph). After the data were collected, each of the students’ paper was read to identify the use of cohesive devices based on the theory of cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976). Then, the number, the frequency and the percentage of cohesive devices were counted. The results of the study revealed that reference had the highest percentage (52.04%), followed by lexical cohesion (32.95%) and conjunction (15.02%). Meanwhile, substitution and ellipsis were absent. Although there were three types of cohesive to be used, the errors still happened in small number such as in conjunction; but, so, or and and.

Use of Cohesive Devices in Paragraph Writing by Efl Students at English Language Centers in Vietnam

“…Notably, the students in the present study used mostly personal reference followed by conjunction. This result is broadly in line with those of previous research (Bahaziq, 2016;Nirwanto, 2021;Nurhidayat et al, 2021;Saadat & Alavi, 2018). It could be that students tended to use reference to express their personal experience or tell stories as all the writing topics except Topic 1 were related to personal experience.…”

“…The analysis of use of cohesive devices in learners' writing was based on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion framework. This framework has been employed by many researchers (e.g., Cho & Shin, 2014;Liu & Braine, 2005;Nasser, 2017;Nirwanto, 2021;Yang & Sun, 2012) since it is considered comprehensive, explicit and easy to understand and as such, it enhances the reliability of data coding.…”

“…In terms of lexical cohesion, students used synonyms more than other cohesive markers. Another recent study on Indonesian EFL learners (Nirwanto, 2021) also found reference, conjunction and repetition were most common while ellipsis and substitution were not used at all in opinion essays.…”

“…32). It has thus been selected as a theoretical foundation for analysing cohesive devices in written texts produced by ESL/EFL learners over the decades (e.g., Cho & Shin, 2014;Liu & Braine, 2005;Nasser, 2017;Nirwanto, 2021;Yang & Sun, 2012). Although recent research might shed light on how formulaic language or lexical bundles which are not addressed in Halliday and Hasan's (1976) framework could enhance textual cohesion (e.g., Boers, 2020;Kim & Kessler, 2022), the use of such multi-word items or expanded categories of collocations, might not be present in all kinds of texts, especially those produced by low proficiency learners.…”

Grammatical Cohesion in Students’ Undergraduate Thesis

“…Cohesion exists when interpretations among some discourse elements rely on each other. Then, it could be concluded that an element strengthens each other (Dascalu et al, 2018;Nirwanto, 2021). Preceding resources cannot understand as a particular element.…”