EXAMINING GRAMMATICAL COHESIVE DEVICES OF ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS BY UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS OF THE ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

Oleh :
Mayang Ardiansyah - K2219050 - Fak. KIP

Cohesive devices are tools that are fundamental to building good writing by linking every component in a writing until it creates cohesion and improves the coherence of the writing. This study aims to analyze the use of grammatical cohesive devices in students' argumentative essays and the errors contained. Deductive content analysis was conducted on seventeen argumentative essays written by English education students in the essay writing class they had previously taken. The study was carried out based on a theoretical framework by Halliday & Hasan (1976), which divides grammatical cohesive devices into four categories, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. In addition, Brown's (2007) framework was also used to determine the cause of the error. The results of the analysis of this study showed that (1) The findings indicate that the students heavily use grammatical cohesive device reference, especially personal reference and demonstrative reference, followed by conjunctions, to construct cohesion in their essays. They rely primarily on referring expressions to continue the idea rather than other kinds of grammatical cohesive devices. On the other hand, substitution and ellipsis are used minimally, and this shows that the students have a tendency to avoid using complicated cohesive devices. (2) The second finding indicates that the errors found in the students’ argumentative essay writing are relatively small, with 31 out of 740 grammatical cohesive devices. This shows that they had not met extensive challenges while writing the essays using their choice of grammatical cohesive devices. The errors obtained were very few compared to the number of cohesive devices found. This happened because, after conducting a supplementary interview, it was discovered that the students used online and AI-based writing aids to help develop their writing. Through the results of this study, it is hoped that teaching instructors will be able to provide a better understanding of the use of cohesive devices and also increase students' awareness of the use of online-based writing tools in their writing