AN ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE WRITING THE NINTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP NEGERI 1 GIANYAR BASED ON TEXT’S COHESION AND COHERENCE

AN ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE WRITING THE NINTH GRADE

STUDENTS OF SMP NEGERI 1 GIANYAR BASED ON TEXT’S

COHESION AND COHERENCE 

  

1. a. Title: AN ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE WRITING THE NINTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP  NEGERI 1 GIANYAR BASED ON TEXT’S COHESION AND COHERENCE 

b. Name: Anom D, Seken A, Suarnajaya W

c. University: Language Education Study Program, Postgraduate Program Ganesha University of Education Singaraja, Indonesia

d. E-mail: anomyoung@yahoo.com, w_suarna@yahoo.com
  
2.Abstract 

a.      Concept: This study aimed at describing and explaining the cohesion and coherence created by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in their narrative writings. 
b.      Subject: ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in academic year 2011/2012. 
c.       Method: a)scripts of students narrative writings, b), responses to the students’ questionnaire, and c) script of teacher’ interview. 
d.      Theory: Halliday and Hasan (1976), Alterberg (1987), Wuang, Hui and Sui, Danni, (2010), and Connor (1990) and Connor and John (1990). 
e.       The findings: The findings of the study showed the cohesion of the narratives was achieved by the used of cohesive devices. The coherence of the narratives was also achieved through the development of themes, the generic structure, and the tenses used. Most of the students have created cohesive and coherent narratives although some problems identified. 
f.       Words: 251 words 
g.      Key word: cohesion, coherence and narrative writing. 
  
3. Introduction

a.      Background of the Study

   Reason for the study

Recently, skill in writing becomes more and more important since it has an important role in global communication, especially after the booming of the digital technology.  Through writing, one can communicate to and share information with others. For those who want to become members of international business, administrative or academic communities, they have to become proficient writers (Tribble,1997).

   Research purpose

Furthermore, by writing students are assisted to reinforce the grammatical structure, idioms, and vocabularies which have been taught, to have adventure with language, to go beyond what they have learnt to say and to become involved in the new language (Sattayatham and Pongrat, 2008)

   Theory and result of previous research

·         Burnaby (1984) states that writing is extremely cognitive activity which needs control of a number of variables simultaneously.

·         A good writing according to Corbett in Sutama (1997) requires three important components that should be fulfilled, namely, unity, coherence and adequate development with coherence as the most important component. It means a paragraph could be unified but it may still be not coherent yet (Corbett, in Sutama 1997).

·         Celce –Murcia & Olshtain (2000:125) claim that cohesion and coherence are two important features of well-written text that should be considered in writing.

·         Concerning the term ‘coherence’, several researchers and linguists define it from different perspectives. Castro (2004) regards coherence as the link in a text that connects ideas and makes the flow of thought meaningful and clear for the readers. Halliday and Hasan (1976) mention that coherent texts have two haracteristics: cohesion and register.

Result: In this study, the analysis of the cohesive and coherence of the narrative text uses the theory proposed by Halliday (1976). In relation to cohesiveness and coherence of a text, in this study the researcher analyzed cohesion of the coherence of the texts written by the ninth grade students. The genre of the text analyzed was narrative texts.

4. Theoretical Review

a.      The Concept of Coherence

There are two types of coherence, namely generic coherence and situational coherence. (Halliday and Hasan 1976 : 23). Situational coherence, which according to systemic functional linguistics covers field, tenor and mood, is realized through lexicogrammatical categories. In the case of narrative text, the lexicogrammatical items used to express register should be clear and simple, so that the readers can internalize or catch the message conveyed in narrative text. According to these researchers, coherent text has two characteristics: cohesion and register. Cohesion is defined as a semantic concept referring to “relation of meaning that exist within the text and that define it as text” Register is defined as the coherence with a context; that is, it refers to the variety of language which is appropriate for the situation of the speech events. Thus, they claim that coherence, or texture, is created by linguistic features, which implies that there must be some linguistic properties of the text that contribute to coherence, one being grammatical cohesion and other being lexical cohesion. According to Connor (1990) and Connor and John (1990), coherence is traditionally described as the relationships that link the ideas in a text to create meaning for readers. Although coherence is crucial to effective writing, it is often considered an abstract, exclusive, and controversial concept that is difficult to teach and difficult to learn. Research has found that in their writing, ESL/EFL students focus almost exclusively on the word and sentence levels rather than the level of the whole discourse, that is, textual coherence (Bamberg, 1984).

 

a.      Theory of Cohesion

According to Eggins (1994) define the term “cohesion’ refers to the way of the part of a discourse are related together. Cohesion denotes certain features of a text like the semantic tie in a text, the consistency of participant, and the connection in terms of lexical selections. Cohesion has role of building up sentences in any given text. This comes through the linking of different parts of a text to teach other so that it gives a structure to a text. It helps in hanging sentences together in a logical way, for having a right meaning. So, cohesion has relation with the broader concept of coherence. In grammatical cohesion, the relationship between and within a text is signed by means of grammatical elements.Meanwhile, lexical cohesion refers to how a writer uses lexical items such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to relate to the text consistently to its area of focus (Eggins, 1994). It is signaled by means of lexical elements or vocabularies.

·         Grammatical Cohesion

Grammatical cohesion comprises reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction.

a.       Reference

Reference is the first item of grammatical cohesion described by Halliday and Hasan (1976). There are three main types of references: personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference ( Halliday and Hasan, 1976:37).

b.      Substitution

substitution as replacement of a language element by another one which is used to replace repetition. For this kind of reference is classified into three types namely, nominal, verbal, and clause. The nominal substitution includes are one/ones and same. The verbal substitution is do including the use of does, did, doing and done. The clausal substitution are so and not.

c.       Ellipsis

Ellipsis is the leaving out of words or phrases from sentences where they are unnecessary because they have already been referred to or mentioned. (Longman Dictionary p.121).

d.      Conjuction

Conjunction is “linking adverbial” and based on Longman Dictionary conjunction is a word which joins words, phrases or clause, such as but, and, when. In relation to this, Halliday and Hasan (1976) refer to conjunction as “text building devices”.

b.      Narrative Writing

According to Langan (2005: 191), narration is commonly called as storytelling, whether we are relating a single story or several stories related to ones.

5. Statements of the Problems

(1) How do the ninth grade students of SMPN 1 Gianyar create cohesion in their narrative writings?

(2) How do the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar create coherence in their English narrative writings?

(3) What are the problems encountered by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 in creating cohesion and coherence in their English narrative writings? 
6. The Objective of the Study

(1) To describe and explain the cohesion created by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in their English narrative writing.

(2) To describe and explain the coherence created by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in their English narrative writing.

(3) To describe and explain the problems encountered by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in creating cohesiveness and coherency in their narrative writing. 
7. Significant of the Study

the result and suggestion of the present study are expected to be used as a consideration in organizing teaching materials, telling the teachers how far the learners have progressed, and providing insights on how to help students become aware of elements of coherence in writing. For the students, it is expected that this study may be valuable and could help them develop their writing into a good and creative one. For further research, this study may provide a reference for those who are interested in text analysis, especially the study of text cohesion and coherence.

8. Research Method

a.      Method: qualitative

b.      Research subject

The subjects in this study were students at the ninth grade of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in academic year 2011/2012.

c.       The secondary subject

The secondary subject of the present study was the English teacher of the ninth grade students.

d.      Research object

The object of this study was the students’ narrative writings based on the text’s cohesion and coherence.

e.       The sources of data

(1) Students’ writings.(2) Students’ questionnaire (3) And teacher’s interview

9. Finding ad Discussion

a.      Finding

1.      The use of cohesion

The use of references was the highest in frequency; it was about 2224 items (74%), substitution was 12 items (0.40%), ellipsis was 5 items (0.17%) and

conjunction was 762 items (25.37%). The use of references included personal

reference,1695items (76%), demonstrative reference was 509 items (23%) and

comparative one was 20 items (0.85%).

2.      The use of coherence

There were 8 tenses found on the English narrative writing written by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar. They were simple past tense found in 44

narratives (97%), past perfect tense found in 4 narratives (8.95%), past continuous tense found 8 narratives (17.70%), simple present tense in 38 narratives (84.40%),

simple continuous tense in 5 narratives (11.10%, simple perfect tense in 4 narratives (8.95%), past future tense in 2 narratives (4.44%) and simple future tense in 15 narratives 33.33%).

3.      The problems in their narrative

The problems spread from sentence patterns (292 occurrence), verb pattern/forms (542 occurrences), conjunction (3 occurrences), spelling ( 39 occurrences),wordchoice(49occurrences), plural form (59 occurrences), over generalization (7 occurrences) , article use (81 occurrences), ellipsis (2 occurrence), preposition use (28 occurrences), apostrophe (7 occurrences), adverb form (4 occurrences), syllabification (10 occurrences) and capital (11 occurrences).

b.      Discussion

Based on the finding, the cohesion of the narratives was created through the use of cohesive devices. Both categories of cohesion were found the students writings. The first category was grammatical cohesion. This category included the use of reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. The second one included the uses of reiteration and collocation. The use of grammatical cohesion was found in all the students’ narrative writings. This indicated that the students already knew these kinds of devices. They have used them but they do not know the words cohesive devices. It meant in teaching and learning process, teachers do not introduce the determination of cohesive devices. Even though they do not know that determination, but all kinds of these devices occurred in the students’ narratives

The coherence of the narratives was viewed from the development of themes of the narratives, structure of ideas of each paragraph to support the themes, the generic structure of narrative and grammatical coherence. There were 8 interesting themes for the students. Among those themes, love was the most interesting theme for the students. From this finding showed us that in their age this theme was familiar and close with theme. This condition can be an input for the teachers in choosing theme when teaching writings especially in narrative writings. The less interesting theme for the students was smartness and honesty. They may not be familiar with these themes yet. Unfamiliarity may be caused by those theme were far from their daily life so in writing these theme did not appear frequently in their writing. Another cause was the number of the subjects was limited. If the number were more, it was possibility these theme would occur more. Another way to see the coherence of the text was from its generic structure. Most of narrative writings used the common generic structure of a narrative text. The structure was orientation, then were followed by a complication and was closed by a resolution. This implied that the students were very familiar with the generic structure of the narrative text. This was in line with the responses of the questionnaire. However, some narratives did not use the common structure, they uses their own style even though they know the structure.

10. Conclusion

The cohesion of the narratives written by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 gianyar was created by the uses of cohesive devices. The cohesive devices used were in terms of grammatical cohesive devices and lexical ones. The coherence of the narratives was viewed from the development of themes of the narratives, structure of ideas of each paragraph to support the themes, the generic structure of narrative and grammatical coherence. The problem encountered by the students in the way to create cohesive and coherent narratives were sentence patterns, verb patterns/forms conjunction , spelling, word choice, plural forms, over generalization, the use of article, ellipsis, preposition use, pronoun use, apostrophe, adverb form, syllabification, and capital.