A study of cohesive devices encountered in expository compositions of the fourth semester students in IKIP Malang

A paragraph can be said well organized if the sentence ideas in the paragraph logically follow one after another. In another words, there is a continuity of though within a paragraph. According to Moore ( 1965), this continuity can be secured by the use of connectives, transitional phrase, repetition of key terms and sentence pattern, and pronoun. Likewise Moore, Halliday and Hasan (1976) said that the relations within sentence and among sentence are achieved by using cohesive devices, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Cohesive devices are very important in writing an essay in order to relate the sentences and the thought within and between paragraph. However, there were many students produce errors in using cohesive devices, even the easiest one. Therefore, the writer intended to make a study about cohesive devices, especially cohesive devices used in exemplification and process essay. The writer used the fourth semester students of IKIP Malang as a subject. The academic year of the students was 1997/ 1998. There were two groups used as a sample, namely group A and group B. Group A consisted of 24 students and group B consisted of 26 students. In this case, the writer analysed all the papers of the respective students. Having collected students' papers or the data, the writer encircled the words belong to the types of cohesive devices. The writer also classified the word by giving number. Then she tallied and counted the frequency the cohesive devices. In addition to this, the writer also counted the errors of the cohesive devices. From the data, the writer found that the types of cohesive devices mostly used by the students both in exemplification and process essays were reference, especially personal reference. While the most frequent errors happened in exemplification and process essays were demonstrative reference and additive conjunction respectively. Due to the limited of time, the writer only analysed the data according to the general and common types of cohesive devices. In fact, the cohesive devices were classified and explained more specifically by Halliday and Hasan. Besides that, the cohesive devices were applied not only in writing, but also in reading. Therefore, it is suggested that the further studies analysed the usage of cohesive devices in another type of writing or in even in another skill. Besides that, the writer suggests another researcher to analyze the cohesive devices in more detail