106 EEJ 4 (2) (2014) English Education Journal http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/eej THE UNITY OF MEANINGS IN THE VOCATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEXTBOOK Amalia Rahmawati, Dwi Rukmini, Djoko Sutopo Prodi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, Program Pascasarjana, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia Info Artikel ________________ Sejarah Artikel: Diterima Oktober 2014 Disetujui Oktober 2014 Dipublikasikan November 2014 ________________ Keywords: Unity of meanings; Cohesion; Coherence; Thematic progression ____________________ Abstract ___________________________________________________________________ This study aims to describe the cohesion, coherence, thematic progression and the unity of meanings of the texts in the tenth grade of vocational high school textbook. There are twenty five texts in English textbook published by LP2IP as the data source. This study is a descriptive qualitative discourse analysis. The finding show that the high percentage of cohesive devices is reference and repetition, which means that the texts are cohesive enough. The use of reference and coherence contribute the unity of meanings grammatically and lexically. The high percentage of reiteration theme in the texts means that the texts use simple sentence. The use of simple sentence is because the readers are students of tenth grade vocational high school. There are five out of twenty five texts that have problem in thematic progression. 80% texts are unified, and 20 % are problematic text. The problems occur because of the overuse of reiteration theme and the unconnected idea of the clauses. As a material in teaching and learning, texts should be unified to make the students easy to understand. © 2014 Universitas Negeri Semarang  Alamat korespondensi: Kampus Unnes Bendan Ngisor, Semarang, 50233 E-mail: pps@unnes.ac.id ISSN 2087-0108 Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 107 INTRODUCTION A vocational high school is one of the high school levels in Indonesia that produces the students to be workers. As a school, it needs a curriculum. The current curriculum is curriculum 2013. There are three schools in Kudus which have implemented curriculum. Moreover, those schools use the same book published by LP2IP. As a material in teaching and learning process, textbook contains some texts. Those texts should have the unity of meanings of texts in order to make the students easy to understand the texts. The unity of meanings of texts can be realized from cohesion, coherence, and thematic progression. Cohesion and coherence, as Derewianka (2011: 3), become the important thing in language function. In happens because according to her, one of the language functions is to create cohesive and coherent text. Therefore, cohesion and coherence can create a good text. Furthermore, cohesion and coherence belong to the component of discourse analysis. Celce-Murcia (2007) stated that “discourse competence refers to the selection, sequencing, and arrangement of utterances to create a unified text”. In other words, the unity of text is very important in communication especially for discourse competence. In creating a unified text, cohesion and coherence are important. Moreover, the way of observing the development of ideas is called thematic progression. Therefore, there are three terms in the unity of meanings of texts; they are cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. Povolna (2009: 94) added that cohesion and coherence are important to know the quality of texts, although they are not related each other. It means that one text can be a cohesive text, but it is not a coherent text, and vice versa. The exact differences are cohesion focuses on the formal link; coherence focuses on the abstract one; and thematic progression focuses on the development of the theme- rheme. As a model of reading text, the texts in vocational high school textbook should have the unity of meanings. By analyzing the unity of meanings of texts, the unified text can be observed. Moreover, the unity of meanings can be one of the considerations for the teacher in selecting the reading texts. Therefore, the students can learn English easily. A text belongs to be a good text if it fulfils two properties; they are cohesion and coherence (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 2). This is supported by Eggins (1994:87) that there are two properties by which clauses could hang together in one unity, namely cohesion and coherence. She added that cohesion is the internal property of paragraph, while coherence is contextual properties of it. The internal property of paragraph means that cohesion is textual. The understanding of the text can be found from the text itself. Then, coherence is contextual properties. It means that coherence is a matter of content rather than of form. In coherent text, the reader or listener can know how the speaker or writer organizes the text.. The unity of the text can be seen from how each element in paragraph relates each other. Then, coherence relates to the process because it is more contextual. To know the cohesion of text, cohesive devices are needed. Cohesive devices are the tool to know how each element in the text is related. Additionally, the relation between one element and the other element is called tie. Trough cohesive devices, the types of cohesion can be identified. The cohesive devices can be seen from grammatical lexical aspect (Halliday and Matthiensen, 2004:533). From the grammatical aspect, they are reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction. Moreover, from the lexical aspect, it can be repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy and collocation. Coherence is contrasted with cohesion. The first difference comes from the judgment. Hoey in Watson, Thienpermpook and Keyuravong (2004: 87) argued that cohesion is more objective and coherence is more Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 108 subjective judgment that can make different opinion from reader to reader. If cohesion refers to the linguistics devices of the text that can be analyzed formally, coherence is in the mind of the writer and reader. It means that cohesion can be more objective because cohesion uses devices in analyzing the text. In other side, coherence is more subjective because it is in abstract. Because coherence is in the mind of the writer and reader for written language and in the mind of speaker and listener for spoken language, Thornbury (2012: 36) states that coherence is the capacity of a text to make sense. Making sense of a text is an act of interpretation. The interpretation depends on what the reader or listeners bring to a text as what the writer or speaker puts on it (McCarthy, 1994: 27). It can be said that coherence is a quality of the reader or listener drive to the text. Coherence as stated by Celce Murcia and Olshtain (2000: 8) contributes to the unity of a piece of discourse such that the individual sentences or utterances hang together and relate to each other. The knowledge of the reader or listener also gives the understanding of the utterances that hang together and relate to each other. According to Salkie (1995: 3), repeating the content words can help the text becomes coherent. Simplify, if the content words appear in every clause, it will make the coherent text, but repeating the content words sometimes is not enough to create a coherent text. Thematic progression is related to the previous discussion about theme and rheme. According to Butt et al. (2000: 142) defined that thematic progression is the progression of new Themes. It has textual meanings of how experiential and interpersonal meanings are organized in a linear and coherent way. Thematic progression contributes to the cohesive development of a text, and then produces a coherent whole text. According to Eggins (1994: 303-304), there are three types of thematic progression. They are reiteration or constant theme, zigzag theme and multiple theme. First is re-iteration or constant theme. In this type of theme, the pattern of thematic progression has the same theme that well organized or regularly. While the rheme of each clause gives further explanation to the same theme. This first type of thematic progression is easy to be understood and makes the reader or listener easy to find the information. In the other hand, the disadvantage of this type is this pattern could probably make a monotonous text. The second type is zigzag theme. In this pattern, an element that is in the previous clause becomes the theme in the current clause. The theme of a certain sentence can be the summary of most of the content of the previous sentence and it makes a new point that is a new rheme. This type can make the reader or listener curious for the next information because the text seems smoothly. Furthermore, this type is more easily to be regarded as coherent. The last type is multiple theme. In this pattern, the theme of one clause introduces a number of different pieces of information, each of which is then picked up and made theme in subsequent clauses Text which has this pattern will have a clear layout for the reader or listener to catch what the passage is about. It happens because the next theme has been introduced in the previous rheme. In addition, it will make the information more specific and will impress readers as logical and coherent METHODS The data of this study was collected from the English textbook published by LP2IP for tenth grade of vocational high school. The reason of using this book is because the vocational high schools in Kudus that has implemented curriculum 2013 use this book. Moreover, this book becomes the main material in teaching and learning for the students of vocational high school. There are twenty-five Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 109 texts from eighty-one texts that had been analyzed. Discourse analysis was chosen since the aim of this study is to know the quality of the texts. In analyzing the quality of a text, interpretation becomes the important way to be a good study. As Litchman (2010:190) suggested that discourse analysis is a technique or method in research that has several interpretations. In interpreting the unity of meanings of texts, there are three items that should be analyzed. They are cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. It means that the data were classified into those terms. For the cohesion aspect, the data were classified based on the cohesion categories as suggested by Halliday and Matthiensen (2004) which consisted of nine items, such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, mieronymy and collocation. For the coherence aspect, the data were classified into seven types as suggested by Butt et al. (2000) which were topical theme, textual theme, interpersonal theme, the topical textual theme, the topical interpersonal theme, the textual interpersonal theme and the topical textual interpersonal theme. Moreover, for the thematic aspect, the data were classified into three types as suggested by Butt et al. (2000) which were reiteration theme, zigzag theme and multiple theme. The last is for the unity of meanings of texts aspect. In this aspect, the data were classified based on cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. Simplify, the data were compared based on three aspects. The analysis was done by counting the percentage of each type, comparing them based on the part, then interpreting the analysis. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS Based on the analysis, the researcher realized that the unity of meanings of texts is very important to observe the quality of a text. The unity of meanings can be seen from three aspects, they are cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. After conducting the analysis of cohesion of texts in the textbook published by LP2IP, most of the texts are cohesive text. The cohesive texts can be seen from nine aspects that must be analyzed. They are reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy and collocation. For the first aspect, all of the texts contain some reference tie. They are classified into personal, demonstrative and comparative reference. Based on the function, they belong to anaphoric, cataphoric, exohpora and homophora reference. The example of anaphoric reference can be seen below: GunungTujuh Lake is one of the many lakes in KabupatenKerinci in Jambi province. It is an amazing tourist place to visit Based on the example above, the word it points ahead to GunungTujuh Lake. It means that the tie belongs to anaphoric reference. Moreover, the example of cataphoric reference is: but you don't know where it is. GuaTabuhan is located near Pacitan in East Java. Based on the example above, the word it refers to GuaTabuhan. The use of pronoun it indicates the use of pronoun reference. Moreover based on the function, the tie belongs to cataphoric reference. It happens because the tie points forward. The second type of cohesion is substitution. In this study, there is no substation since the texts are written language. Substitution usually occurs in the spoken language. The third type is ellipsis. All of the types of ellipsis occur in this study. There are fifteen texts that use ellipsis. Most of them are nominal ellipsis. The example of ellipsis can be seen below: The Bunaken national Marine park was formally established..and is among the… Based on the example above, there is one missing thing. It is the word(s) after and. however there is something omitted, the reader can understand that the omitting words are the Bunaken National Marine Park. It can be Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 110 classified into nominal ellipsis because the writer omits those words that belong to noun phrase. Therefore it is called nominal ellipsis. The fourth type is conjunction. Conjunction is mostly used in all of the texts. It happens because it can connect between clauseand the other clauses. In this study, there is no text that uses elaboration conjunction. Most of the conjunctions used are extension conjunction, especially for addition conjunction. The fifth type is repetition. Repetition appears in very text. Repetition is useful in creating a coherent text however the overuse of repetition can make the boring text. As the materials in teaching for students, repetition can help them in understanding the text. The sixth is synonymy and antonymy. 40% texts use synonymy and 24% texts use antonymy. It means that the texts have connection in term of lexical. The use of synonymy and antonymy become one of strategy in avoiding the overuse of repetition. Additionally, the use synonymy and antonymy can enrich the students’ vocabulary. The seventh cohesive device is hyponymy. Hyponymy means the relation of “be kind of”. Based on the analysis, 72% texts use hyponymy of the text. The use of it can give the students way in avoiding the repetition. Moreover, hyponymy is mostly used after repetition in term of lexical cohesion. The eighth and last cohesive devices are meronymy and collocation. They are used in 52% texts. The high use of them indicates that the texts in English textbook have connected lexically. The clear of the cohesion analysis can be seen in figure 1 below Figure 1. The Analysis of Cohesion Coherence of the Texts in the English Textbook of the Tenth Grade of Vocational High School Coherence is the second part in describing the unity of meanings of texts. In this study, the coherence of texts is observed and classified into seven types; they are topical theme, textual theme, interpersonal theme and four types of multiple theme. Based on the analysis, most of the texts use topical theme. The use of them means that the sentences belong to simple sentence. It happens because the most of the sentences begin with nominal group or adverbial group that function as subject, adjunct or complement of them text. On the other hand, the use of multiple theme of textual and interpersonal theme is not found in the texts. That finding indicates that it seems to be avoided because if it is used it can create the complex sentence. The example of coherence analysis can be seen below. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 120% The Analysis of Cohesion Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 111 The Bunaken National Marine Park was formally established in 1991 The Bunaken National Marine Park was formally established in 1991 Theme Rheme and is among the first of Indonesia's growing system of marine parks. and is among the first of Indonesia's growing system of marine parks Conj; Textual Theme Rheme Although each of these islands has a special character, Although each of these islands has a special character Conj; Textual Topical Rheme Theme Based on the example 1, clause 1belongs to topical theme. It can be seen from the beginning of clause as theme. The theme functions as subject of clause. The second clause, the clause begins with conjunction. It can be seen from conjunction “and” that means adding the information in clause 2. Therefore, clause number 2 belongs to textual theme. Moreover, clause number 3 belongs to the multiple theme of textual and topical theme. The first reason is for the textual theme. It comes from the conjunction “although” that relates to the previous idea. Second, the topical theme can be seen from each of these islands. That noun phrase functions as the subject of the clause. The use of thematic progression indicates that the development of theme. Based on the analysis that has been done, most of texts have good development of texts. It can be seen from the classification of theme, such as reiteration theme, zigzag theme and multiple theme. Based on the analysis, most of the text uses reiteration theme. The use of reiteration theme is because the readers of the texts are the tenth grade students of vocational high school. The example of thematic progression analysis can be seen below. C Theme Rheme 1 GunungTujuh Lake is one of the many lakes in KabupatenKerinci in Jambi province. 2 It is an amazing tourist place to visit. 3 The location of GunungTujuh Lake is in KecamatanKayuAro. Based on the example of thematic progression above, the relation between the first and second clause is reiteration theme. It can be observed from the use of pronoun it that refers to GuningTujuh Lake. Moreover, the relation between the second and third clause is zigzag theme. The reason is because the idea of the theme 3 relates to the rheme 2. Those clauses are good because the themes point to the previous theme or rheme. In the other hand, there is a problem text that the theme does not relate to the previous theme or rheme. The analysis of problematic text can be seen below. Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 112 C Theme Rheme 12 The temperature around the lake is very cold. 13 Besides waterfalls you can also find animals such as siamang, elephants and birds 14 GunungTujuh Lake is really beautiful with spectacular scenery. Based on the example above, clause 13 becomes the problematic clause. It happens because the theme 13 does not relate to the previous theme or rheme. Simplify, there is word waterfalls that is not mentioned in the previous clauses. Therefore, clause 13 seems out of the context. The reader will have difficulties in understanding this text. The unity of meanings of texts can be seen from the cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. Based on the analysis, there are 80% texts that belong to a good cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. In other words, 20% texts in English textbook published by LP2IP belong to problematic text. They have problem because they do not have good cohesion, coherence, thematic progression and the overuse of reiteration theme. The example of the overuse of reiteration theme can be seen below. Based on the example above, the text uses reiteration in many clauses. The relation between theme 3 and theme 4 is reiteration. It happens because the clause points the same thing with the previous clause and repeats the word. Repetition is helpful in creating a coherent text but the overuse of repetition makes the reader bored. CONCLUSION The unity of meanings of texts can be seen from cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. Based on the analysis of this study, the researcher concludes that 1) Most of the texts are cohesive. The most cohesive devices used are reference and repetition. Moreover, the substitution is not used in the texts. It happens because the texts are written discourse. 2) Most of the texts are coherent. The analysis of coherence comes from the types of theme- rheme. The most of type used is reiteration theme. It means that the texts are simple sentence. 3) Based on the study, several texts have problem in thematic progression. The problem happens because the idea does not relate to the previous clauses. 4) The unity of meanings is realized through cohesion, coherence and thematic progression. Based on the study, there are 80% texts that are good text. In the other hand, there are 20% problematic texts. The problems are in the C Theme Rheme 3 We went there by train 4 We left for Yogyakarta at 8:30 a.m 5 and arrived at Tugu railway Station forty-five minutes later 6 Many becak drivers were offering their services to passengers 7 when we were out of the railway station 8 We were very excited 9 that finally we were in Yogyakarta 10 Soon we walked to JalanMalioboro 11 We decided to have soto as our breakfast 12 We were enjoying the soto while inhaling the fresh air Amalia Rahmawati, dkk. / English Education Journal 4 (2) (2014) 113 overuse of reiteration theme and the use of unconnected idea of the clauses. REFERENCES Butt, D. et al. 2000. Using Functional Grammar: An Explore’s Guide.. Sydney: Macquire University Sydney Celce-Murcia, M. and Olshtain E. 2000.Discourse and Context in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press. Celce-Murcia, M. 2007. Rethinking the Role of Communicative Competence. 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