COHESION AND COHERENCE IN THE DESCRIPTIVE AND NARRATIVE WRITING OF HEARING-IMPAIRED STUDENTS

Hearing-impaired children often encounter literacy problems because they do not have strong basis of spoken language (Field 2004). Typically, in their writing, they use limited range of sentence structure and grammar system. Antia, Reed and Kreimeyer (2005) stated that children with hearing impairment undergo some deficiency in their writing because they are delayed in their language development compared to their hearing peers. Myklebust (1964) as quoted in Strong (1990) found that sentences written by deaf children and adolescents tend to be shorter and contain fewer conjoined and subordinated clauses. This study aims at describing the cohesion and coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976) in the descriptive and narrative writing produced by 26 hearing-impaired students of two special elementary schools in Surabaya with moderate hearing loss up to profound hearing loss. The data were taken while the students had Indonesian class. They were asked to produce 2 descriptive writing and 2 narrative writing based on the pictures given. The result of the study showed that the grammatical cohesive devices were very rarely used in both kinds of writing, except reference. Substitution was not found in the writing at all. Ellipsis was found in descriptive writing, yet very rarely. Few conjunctions were used in the descriptive writing and many i