A study on the expository composition coherence of the fifth semester students of the English Department of Widya Mandala University

One of the characteristics of a good composition is coherence. It is important for a writer to make use of this characteristic in putting ideas on paper since it helps a writer to organize his/her ideas as clearly as possible so that the readers will not find it too difficult to understand what he has written. This study investigated the expository composition coherence of the fifth semester students of the English Department of Widya Mandala University with the intension to describe the coherence quality between (a) the thesis statement and the topic sentences of each essay, and (b) how the transitional words/phrases are used. To achieve these objectives, the writer asked 21 students to write an expository composition about "The Reasons of the Clothing Regulation Issued by the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University". The population of this study was the fifth semester students who took Writing IV at the English Department of Widya Mandala. After the data were collected, the writer analyzed them in terms of the thesis statement and topic sentence relationship, topic sentence and supporting sentences relationship and the use of transitional words/ phrases. The data analysis showed that 30% of the 105 paragraphs under study were coherent and the other 70% were not coherent. Of these incoherent paragraphs, 35% were written with more than one main idea, 22% with no clear order, 5% with missing sentence and 5% with incomplete paragraphs. These findings show that the coherence between paragraphs is already good, the coherence within the paragraph is still poor while the uses of transitional words/phrases are good enough. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that most of the students under study still found difficulties in writing their compositions coherently especially in terms of idea organization and relevant supporting sentence choice. It is suggested that the writing teachers emphasize the importance of thinking critically and outlining to help the students organize their ideas coherently. It is also suggested that the teachers encourage their students to be self correctors by training them to do peer corrections. Finally, it is suggested that further studies concerning this topic be conducted in order to obtain more generalizable findings and more conclusive statements