EEJ 2 (2) (2012) English Education Journal http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/eej THE REALIZATION OF COHESION IN READING TEXTS USED IN CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL IN THE CLASSROOM Ida Rohmawati  Prodi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, Program Pascasarjana, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia Abstrak Studi ini bertujuan untuk mencari penerapan dari grammar dan lexical cohesive pada buku “Chicken Soup for The Soul in classroom”. 10 teks dipilih dalam penelitian ini dan dianalisa melalui pendekatan deskriptif. Teori kohesi dari Halliday dan Hasan 91976) digunakan untuk menganalisa teks. Studi menunjukan bahwa referensi mempunyai frekuensi tertinggi pada occurrence, diikuti lexical, konjungsi, ellipsis, dan substitusi. Personal reference dan temporal konjungsi sering ditemukan pada teks yang mengindikasikan bahwa teks bergebre recount. Berdasarkan analisis qualitative, dutemukan bahwa teks bersifat kohesif karena level dari kohesif yang mencapai 95%. Dari temuan, dapat disimpulkan bahwateks memenuhi criteria baik dan dapat digunakan sebagai alternative untuk pengajaran recount teks bagi siswa. Abstract This study aims at finding out the realization of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in reading texts from the book entitled “Chicken Soup for the Soul in the Classroom”. The ten reading texts were selected as the corpus of the study. They were then analyzed using qualita- tive descriptive approach. The theory of cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) was used as framework for analyzing the texts. The result of the study shows that reference had the highest frequency of occurrences. Then it was followed by lexical, conjunction, el- lipsis, and substitution. Personal reference and temporal conjunction most frequently occurred in the texts. Therefore, it can be concluded that the texts belong to recount texts. Based on the qualitative analysis, it was found out that the texts are considered to be cohesive because the level of cohesiveness are very high, i.e. more than 95%. From the result of the study, it can be concluded that the texts fulfill the requirements of becoming a good text and they can be used as alternative material for teaching recount texts for Indonesian students. © 2012 Universitas Negeri Semarang Info Artikel Sejarah Artikel: Diterima Agustus 2012 Disetujui September 2012 Dipublikasikan November 2012 Keywords: Cohesion Reading text Cohesive devices  Alamat korespondensi: Kampus Unnes Bendan Ngisor, Semarang 50233 E-mail: iedachantix@yahoo.com ISSN 2087-0108 Ida Rohmawati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) 156 INTRODUCTION The importance of English in communica- tion nowadays brings about the development of English subject. Students are expected to master four language skills. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Among the four skills, Rea- ding can be considered as the main skill since the curriculum nowadays focuses on text types. Also, in the national examination, most of the test items are in the form of reading texts. To over- come the problem, teachers are suggested to use authentic materials which have interesting topics and familiar to students’ life. These can help the students to understand the text easier. Furthermore, the emergence of character education has recently become an important is- sue in Indonesian education system. For English subject, the character education can be taught through reading texts. It can be done by giving motivational or inspirational stories which have moral values so that the students can learn the virtue of life from the stories. Considering the situation above, the rea- ding texts taken from the book entitled Chicken Soup for the Soul in the Classroom is chosen as an alternative media to teach character education through English subject. The book contains les- son plans and students’ favorite stories for reading comprehension, writing skills, critical thinking, and character building. Since the book contains many stories about students’ personal experien- ce, it can be used to teach recount. The book is dedicated for high school students of grade 9-12. However, not all the stories from the book can be applied in our curriculum. It must be se- lected and filtered whether the text is appropriate or not. First, teachers should consider the moral value of the text. Then, they have to consider the level of difficulties of the semantics and syntactic aspect from the text. And last but not least, the cohesion of the text to check whether the text is good or not. Cohesion can be used as a way to deter- mine the quality of a text. It is one of the cont- ributing factors that help students in understan- ding the reading texts. It can reduce the confusion when the students read a text because the senten- ces are related each other. This will help them to understand the plot and the characters of the story since the presupposed item can be found in the text. For this reason, the study aims at inves- tigating the realization of cohesive devices in rea- ding texts found in the book entitled Chicken Soup for the Soul in the Classroom. It is expected that the study will be useful for the students to understand the text easier and to find the relation between sentences within the text from cohesive devices point of view. There have been many studies related to cohesion before this, one of them is written by Utomo (2000). This study is different since the corpus of the data is taken from international published book written by native speaker. I choo- se a topic on cohesion because the studies of co- hesion in reading text show that cohesion makes a substantial contribution to readability. It also plays a central role in reading since it can rela- te one part of a text to another part of the same text. Consequently, it leads continuity to the text. By providing this kind of text continuity cohesion enables the reader to supply all the components of the picture to its interpretation. There are five components of commu- nicative competence according to Celce-Murcia, et al (1995). They are linguistic, actional, socio- cultural, discourse, and strategic competence. Firstly, linguistic competence is the knowledge of the basic language code such as syntax, morpho- logy, vocabulary, phonology, and orthography. The components of this competence do not need further specification though distinctions may not be as clear-cut as often assumed. Secondly, actio- nal competence is the ability to understand and convey communicative intent by interpreting and performing language functions such as compli- menting, reporting, suggesting, etc. There is no one-to-one relationship between linguistics forms and function. Thirdly, sociocultural competence is the mastery of the social rules of language use, i.e. the appropriate application of vocabulary, re- gister, politeness, and style in a given social situ- ation within a given cultures. Fourthly, strategic competence is the knowledge of verbal and non- verbal communication strategies which enable us to overcome difficulties when communication breakdown occur. Last but not least is discourse competen- ce. It is the ability to combine language structures into different types of unified spoken and writ- ten discourse such as dialogue, political speech, academic paper, etc. this happens as an interplay of two levels, i.e. microlevel of grammar and le- xis which is called cohesion and macrolevel of communicative intent and sociocultural context which is called coherence. There are many sub-areas that contribute to discourse competence. One of them is cohesi- on. Bachman and Palmer (1996:13) suggest that a good text should be cohesive. The paragraphs in the text should tie together. They link one another closely by using discourse components. The other 157 Ida Rohmawati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) discourse components are coherence, deixis, gen- re, and conversational structure. They are impor- tant to create a text. However, the discussion will only focus in the sub-area of cohesion. Cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text and that define it as a text (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:4). It occurs whe- re the interpretation of some elements in the dis- course is dependent on that of another. That one presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text. Cohesion deals with the bottom-up ele- ments that help generate the texts, accounting for how pronouns, demonstratives, definite article, and other markers signal texture co-reference in oral and written discourse. It also accounts for how conventions of substitution and ellipsis al- low speakers/writers to indicate co-classification and to avoid unnecessary repetition; the use of conjunction to make explicit links between pro- positions in discourse; lexical chains and lexical repetitions which relate to derivational, seman- tics, and content schemata; and the conventions related to the use of parallel structure which help listeners/readers to process a piece of texts. Lexi- cal cohesion indicates co-extension in the texts. Hence, there are some cohesive ties which belong to the sub–area of cohesion which link the sen- tences/paragraphs such as co-referentiality, co- classification, and co-extension. Furthermore, cohesion in the texts is rea- lized in cohesive devices. There are two types of cohesion, i.e. grammatical and lexical cohesive devices. The grammatical cohesive devices are divided into four heading. They are reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. The first heading is reference. It is the re- lation between an element of the text and somet- hing else by reference to which it is interpreted in the given instance. It is potentially cohesive rela- tion because the thing that serves as the source of the interpretation may itself be an element of text ((Halliday and Hasan, (1976:308-309). By refe- rence, the information/the presupposed item can be retrieved from elsewhere within the text. As a general rule, reference items may be exophoric or endophoric; and if it is endophoric, it can be anaphoric or cataphoric. There are several linguistic items which can create reference cohesion. Halliday and Ha- san (1976:37-39) divide reference into personal reference, demonstrative reference, and compara- tive reference. In addition, Halliday and Hasan (1976:82) say that conjunctive elements are cohesive not in themselves but indirectly, by virtue of their spe- cific meanings; they are not primarily for reach- ing out into the preceding or following text but they express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in a discourse. There are four types of conjunction. METHODS In this research, I used a descriptive qua- litative method. Nunan (1993:4-6) states that qualitative research is a kind of research in which the method of data collection is non-experiment and the type of data is qualitative and the way to analyze the data is interpretive. The qualitative approach is used to unfold the types of gramma- tical and lexical cohesive devices of reading texts. It is also descriptive in the sense that this study is intended to describe the realization of cohesive devices in those reading texts. The objective of this research is to describe the realization of grammatical and lexical cohesi- ve devices in ten reading texts from the book en- titled Chicken Soup for the Soul in the Classroom. The unit of analysis of this study is sentence as sug- gested by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The data gathered were identified and analyzed, then inter- preted, and at the end of the research, I drew the conclusion. There were two reasons for choosing the descriptive qualitative method. Firstly, the data found were parts of written texts. They had to be described before they were analyzed. This step fitted in with the method of descriptive rese- arch. Secondly, the interpretation of a text could not be separated from its context. Thus, the quali- tative method was employed in this research. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION According to Halliday and Hasan (1976:1), the word text refers to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a uni- fied whole. It is a unit of language in use. Further- more, they state that a text is best regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning. Thus it is related to a clause or sentence not by size but by realization, the coding of one symbo- lic system in another. A text is considered to be good text if it is linked closely between one sentence to the other ones or one paragraph to the other ones. In order to link sentences in a paragraph or paragraphs in a text, the paragraphs can be linked by cohesion. Ida Rohmawati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) 158 Cohesion can be used to tie one sentence to the other one. If the text is written cohesively, the text will be coherent. It means that the clauses or sen- tences in the text relate to the context. In line with this, a reading text may be easy for readers to understand if it is written cohesi- vely. It means that sentences and paragraphs in the text tie together by cohesive ties. The reading texts that are written not cohesively may create ambiguity to the readers. It may make the rea- ders misunderstand to the messages. It can be said that cohesion is important factor that makes reading text readable. Reading text will function as a medium in the instruction if the reading text is good in cohesion. The cohesion in the reading text must be compatible. Cohesion can be used to be a considerati- on whether the reading text is good or not. The text is considered to be a good reading text if it is written cohesively and vice versa, the text will be considered not to be a good one if it is not written cohesively. So, it can be concluded that the qua- lity of reading text can be seen from its level of cohesiveness. To analyze the cohesion of the reading tex- ts, I applied Halliday and Hasan’s framework. Ac- cording to their theory, the first thing to be done is by indicating how many cohesive ties instances of a cohesive element within the sentence. Then, for every type of tie I specified what type of co- hesion is involved in terms of reference, substitu- tion, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Thirdly, for each tie, I specified whether this kind of tie was immediate or non-immediate. If it was non-mediated, it was whether mediated, remote or both mediated and remote. There should be also assigning numerical values to each instance. The next step was classifying types of cohesive devices used in the reading text and counting them. From the analysis, it can be seen that the ten reading texts mostly employed three kinds of cohesive devices. Those three cohesive ties oc- curred more frequently than others. They were reference, lexical, and conjunction. It was found that reference occurred more frequently than others, with the total number of 469 (49.11%). Then it was followed by lexical cohesion with 409 (42.83%) occurrences and conjunction with 50 (5.24%) occurrences. There were only 24 (2.51%) occurrences of ellipsis and 3 (0.31%) occurrences of substitution. the fewer occurrences of ellipsis and substitution was because the texts are in the form of written text. Furthermore, the two cohe- sive ties are mostly used in the context of spoken language such as in dialogue. Halliday (1994:337) also argues that the use of ellipsis and substitu- tion is the prominent characteristics of spoken language. Before getting more detail, let us see Table 1 for general picture of the distribution of cohesi- ve devices in the reading texts. From the overall reading texts, it can be concluded that cohesive devices occurred fre- quently in the text. The presupposed items could be traced back from the preceding text and the cohesive ties were in the form of immediate. It means that the texts can be considered as good texts. Personal reference and temporal conjuncti- on occurred frequently in the texts. The dominant Table 1. The General Picture of the Distribution of Cohesive Devices in the Reading Texts Text No. Types of Cohesion Reference Substitution Ellipsis Conjunction Lexical Total 1 65 0 1 5 76 147 2 96 0 0 7 52 155 3 18 0 0 2 44 64 4 41 1 1 1 27 71 5 84 0 0 10 60 154 6 46 1 1 4 31 83 7 15 0 4 6 41 66 8 18 1 0 5 14 38 9 64 0 0 9 33 106 10 22 0 17 1 31 71 Total 469 3 24 50 409 955 Percentage 49.11% 0.31% 2.51% 5.24% 42.83% 100. % 159 Ida Rohmawati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) occurrences of both types indicated that the texts can be considered as recount texts since the lexi- cogrammatical features of recount text including the use of personal pronoun and temporal con- junction to show a series of events. Furthermore the level of cohesiveness of the texts can be counted by comparing the oc- currence of cohesive ties in each sentence with the number of sentences which do not have co- hesive ties then multiplied it by 100%. From the findings, it can be concluded that the texts have good cohesion since the average percentage of each text is near 100%. It means that most of the texts had no sentence without any cohesive ties. From the ten reading texts, there were two texts which had the percentage below 100%, i.e. text 1 with 96.67% and text 2 with 97.22%. In text 1, Sentence (2) had no cohesive items and it did not relate to sentence (1), meanwhile sentence (26) did not have any reference item neither from the preceding nor following sentence, so they cannot be considered cohesive. And, in text 2, sentence (36) did not contain any cohesive ties for the sen- tence is a direct message from the writer to the reader and as a moral value of the story. The ove- rall occurrences of cohesive ties can be seen in Table 2. CONCLUSION A text is considered to be cohesive if the sentences and paragraphs are written closely related to one another. The sentences and the paragraphs are linked closely by using cohesive devices, such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Cohesion is one of the requirements determining the value of the text is considered as good or not. This is in line with the theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976). They state that a text is regarded to be good if it consists of more anaphoric referen- ces than exophoric references and does not have Table 2. The Occurrences of Cohesive Ties in Each Text A B C D E F Text No. Total Number of Sen- tences Total Number of Cohe- sive Ties Number of Sentence Having Cohesive Ties Num- ber of Sentence Hav- ing No Cohesive Ties The per- centage of cohesive- ness (C / D x 100%) Explanation 1 60 147 58 2 96.67% Sentence (2) do not relate to sentence (1) and (26) do not have any reference item neither from the preceding nor following sentence, so they cannot be considered cohesive. 2 36 155 35 1 97.22% Sentence (36) is not cohesive since there is no cohesive item found in the sentence. It does not contain any grammatical nor lexical cohesive devices. 3 26 64 26 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 4 17 71 17 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 5 33 154 33 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 6 31 83 31 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 7 32 66 32 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 8 11 38 11 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 9 35 106 35 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. 10 28 71 28 - 100% All sentences are cohesive. Ida Rohmawati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) 160 many exophoric references which may create am- biguity. Based on the findings, it can be seen that there are three types of cohesive devices which mostly occur in the ten reading texts from the book entitled Chicken Soup for the Soul in the Clas- sroom. They are reference, lexical, and conjuncti- on. Specifically, references are mostly in the form of personal reference, lexical relations are mostly in the form of reiteration (including repetition), and conjunctive relations are mostly in the form of temporal conjunction. Meanwhile, there are a few occurrences of substitution and ellipsis. The reason for the problem is that because the texts are in the form of written language. The use of those kinds of cohesive relations indicates that the texts fulfill the requirements of becoming a reading material for recount text since they have the lexicogrammatical features of recount such as personal reference and temporal conjunction. Furthermore, the percentage of cohesive- ness which is seen from the occurrences of co- hesive ties in each sentences compared with the number of sentences which did not have cohesi- ve ties is more than 95%. It means that most of the texts had no sentence without any cohesive ties. From the whole interpretation, it can be con- cluded that each text fulfills the requirements of becoming a good text since the text is understan- dable because of its level of cohesiveness. There- fore, the texts can be used as alternative reading material to teach recount text to the senior high school students in Indonesia. The result of the study hopefully can open their mind with the result of the study. It also can enrich the previous theories and research findings about cohesion theory, particularly the use of co- hesive devices and its organizations in creating a better understanding about the relationship bet- ween cohesion and the quality of reading text. Besides that, it may give some advantages to the teacher and the students and the effort to deve- lop the learning and teaching of reading skill at schools. The teacher must choose reading texts based on the factors that contribute to readability of texts such as cohesion. 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