the sentences will create special purpose in context. The communicative purpose of a text is considered to be the most important feature related to genre.
Linguists interpret the concept of context itself in wide variety of range. Halliday 1989:49 tends to use the word “context” to mention the context of
situation. In addition, he also uses the term context to refer to context of culture, inter-textual context, and intra-textual context. Of those contexts suggested by
Halliday, the writer concerns on the last context that is intra-textual context. Intra- textual context is coherence within text, including the linguistics cohesion that
embodies the internal semantic relationship Halliday and Hasan, 1989:49. This concept relates to the aim of my thesis; that is to analyze the connectedness aspect
of students‟ English writing in university level. Related to the concept of connectedness, Lyons 1995:263-264 states that there are two kinds of
connectedness, namely cohesion and coherence. He points out that cohesion has to do with the form of a text while coherence deals with the content of a text.
A text is not considered to be a good one if it is not cohesive, yet a text is considered to be a good text if it contains two properties, they are cohesion and
coherence. Cohesion is an internal property, while coherence is contextual properties of paragraph. So, cohesive text is a text to which a paragraph in the text
ties together, and coherence means that a group of sentences relates to the context.
B. Reason for Choosing the Topic
According to several lecturers in IKIP PGRI Semarang, they have frequently found students‟ writing in the form of paragraphs which are awful
written because of difficult to understand. One of the main difficulties is lack of
cohesion in their writings, which contributes substantially to lower scores in examinations. So far there has been little pedagogic use made of the relationship
between theme and rheme in teaching academic writing and currently, many language lecturers still focus on their feedback to learners on errors which occur
below the clause level, such as lack of subject-verb agreement, incorrect use of verb tenses and so on.
Thus, in an effort to help students produce good writing, it is important for English teachers or lecturers to intensively socialize the importance of paying
attention to the cohesiveness aspects in writing articles, short stories, novels, essays, or paragraphs in orde
r to make the sentences of the students‟ writings hang together so that understandable writing can be created.
Based on the reason above, the writer would like to conduct the research on thematic development by exploring the use of theme and rheme relations in
students‟ writings to improve cohesion in academic texts.
C. Statement of the Problems
Based on the background of the study above, the writer is conducted to answer questions as follows:
1. What kinds of theme are realized in the narrative written by the third
semester students of IKIP PGRI Semarang? 2.
What kinds of thematic development found in the narrative written by the third semester students of IKIP PGRI Semarang?
3. Are the theme-rheme structures helping students to create cohesiveness
of the text?
D. Objectives of the Study
The objectives of the research are: 1.
to identify kinds of theme of narrative paragraph written by the third semester students of IKIP PGRI Semarang
2. to describe kinds of thematic development found in the narrative written
by the third semester students of IKIP PGRI Semarang. 3.
to describe how important are theme-rheme structures in helping students create cohesiveness of the text..
E. Significance of the Study
