Grammatical devices in the theses written by Graduate Students

The objective of this present study was to analyze the type cohesive devices in the theses of graduate students at Widya Mandala Catholic University. This study adopted discourse analysis method. The source of the data was taken from the 21 graduate students’ background of the study section upon considering some set criteria. Additionally, to ensure the reliability of the study the researcher used investigator triangulation to analyze how the cohesive devices employed by the graduate students in their background of the study section would ensure the cohesive relation between sentences in the text. the results indicated that the graduate students employed grammatical cohesive devices. Reference was the most frequently used which was 80.14%, followed by conjunction 19.22%, ellipsis 0.47% and substitution 0.15%. As far as the finding of this present study is concerned, the graduate students’ introduction especially the background of the study seemed to be very cohesive through the use of reference and conjunction. The use of these two cohesive devices would serve not only to link the sentences together but also enable the readers to understand the text. Therefore, in the light of this finding, some pedagogical implications should be taken into consideration especially to teach explicitly about cohesive devices to students so that they would be able to compose a cohesive writing