Discourse Analysis on Writing in term of Cohesion and Coherence of the First Year Studentsat Psychology Faculty of Muhammadiyah University of Prof.Dr.Hamka

fidaniar tiarsiwi, m.pd .; ujang suparman, ma, ph.d; dr. santi chairani djonhar, ma;

This thesis aims to reveal Discourse analysis on writing in term of cohesion and
coherence of first year students at Psychology Faculty of University of Muhammadiyah Prof. DR.HAMKA (UHAMKA).The analysis on students’ writing is that of using cohesive devices as part of unity in sentence level and coherence in the level of mind. Cohesive devices and coherence become the integral parts of a text. It is therefore the fulfilment of two aspects, cohesive and coherence, will make the text easy to understand. The methods is qualitative approach by survey methods which obtained the data scientifically. The researcher collected by using observation, structural interview, and documentation in the form of paragraph or essay written by the students. The interview was done for the lecturer of English and the first year students of Faculty Psychology of UHAMKA. The research is to analyze the students’ written discourse in term of cohesion and coherence in accordance with the research question 1). How isthe quality of students’ writings in
term of cohesion and coherence? 2) Are the students’ writing logically cohesive? 3) Are the ideas logically coherence?The data of the research, were gathered by the way of analyzing written discourse, classroom observation and interviews. There were twenty students from first semester of first year and one lecturer of English chosen purposively as the participant of the research. The major finding of the research is that the written discourse of the students still needs to be improved. The students are so poor in grammatical competency. They are still culturally
influenced by their first language. Syntactically, they constructed their sentences by translating Indonesian into English; therefore, the meaning does notalways go with the English sentence construction. The students seem difficult to put a sentence after another using cohesive devices, finally their writing is not coherent. The finding above is very beneficial for sustainable plan on teaching writing in the future. In fact, writing ability is obtained through constant practice of writing. It is recommended that the teacher will never get bored to let them practice and practice. In the discussion it was found that the students got mistakes (80%) in structure or grammatical construction and cohesive devices (reference8%, Ellipsis 0%, Substitution 4%, lexical cohesion 2% and conjunction 6%). Ellipsis stated 0% reflected that the students were not accustomed to using elliptical word in writing. It is concluded that most students were only weak in structure or grammar.