A Study on Cohesive Devices Used in Social Science Textbooks

Keywords: cohesive devices, social science textbooks. English as an international language which is there are many science books and technology written in English. So we essentially learn English, especially for the students to improve our knowledge by reading science books a lot. Reading can enrich our knowledge, provide various experiences, and help to organize our thought. We are easily able to decode the messages or ideas of texts by mastery in cohesive devices. Cohesive devices are overt features are used to make relationship of the text, providing surface evidence for the text’s unity and connectedness. Furthermore, Reading is one of the major aspects of language. Teaching students to read is one of the most important responsibilities of education because the studies of reading will not only improve the ability to do effective reading, but it will also contribute to the learning of other subject. Then, conducting the background of the study that improves the ability in reading skill, this study is intended to describe the types of cohesive devices used in social science textbooks and frequent the uses of the types of cohesive devices in social science textbooks. Based on the formulations of study above, the purposes of the study which have to reach in this writing. Those are, find out and classify the types of cohesive devices used in social science textbook and to know frequent the uses of the types of cohesive devices in social science textbooks. Where, this study uses research methodology focused on the purpose of the study, the writer uses descriptive research design and quantitative and qualitative approach or survey. Source of data is social science textbooks. The population is the texts in social science textbooks with the samples some texts in eight social science textbooks. This study uses documentary technique to collect the data. Process of data analysis is describe the data which is in the form of cohesive devices is analyzed by means of taxonomic and theoretical analysis. This study focus in cohesive devices, cohesive devices are divided into grammatical and lexical. Which is from each field of cohesive devices has several types of cohesive devices. The types of grammatical cohesive devices are reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. And the types of lexical cohesive devices are reiteration and collocation. From the result of data analysis, found 1547 times of ±1000 words of occurrence of cohesive devices. Where, the percentages of the frequency of occurrence are grammatical cohesive devices (reference: 56%, substitution: 2%, ellipsis: 1%, and conjunction: 37%), and lexical cohesive devices (reiteration: 43% and collocation: 1%). Based on the research findings, there are suggestions are proposed to improve the students mastery in English especially reading skill. For the teacher, it is also expected that they will give more emphasis on those aspects in teaching and learning process, especially in aspect of reading skill. Furthermore, this aspects need to be given more attention, since reference and conjunction are the important aspects to organized the unity of well-written text