Grammatical cohesion in students' argumentative essay

Abstract

This study analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively the cohesive devices used by undergraduate students in their argumentative essay. One-hundred and four essays were collected and assessed by two interraters, but only 64 essays statistically qualified as the corpus of the study. Halliday and Hasan (1976) concept of grammatical cohesion was used as framework for the analysis of the essays. Reference had the highest frequency which is 90.67% of the total cohesive devices with mean score 53.37. Conjunction occurred 326 times in the essays, which is 9.08% with mean score 5.34 while substitution was the least used type of cohesive device which is only 0.25%. The cohesive devices are not significantly correlated with the quality of the students’ essay. The resulting r using Pearson r is -0.054 which is not significant at 05 level of significance. Based on the qualitative analysis, it was found out that certain cohesive types assisted the students in the argumentation process. For instance, the use of adversative conjunctions helped the students establish counterclaims. However, ‘but’ is the most frequently used adversative conjunction by the students which may signify that their knowledge on the use of this kind of cohesive device is limited. There were instances where the students can use concessive like “yet or however” to establish stronger claims. Hence, qualitative analysis supports the concept of form and function. In the students’ argumentative essays, certain forms were chosen over the others for a specific purpose that supports the overall objective of an argumentative text. Key words: Cohesion, coherence, grammatical cohesion

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