7 been emphasized. Therefore, coherence certainly becomes an essential part in the
students’ written work. ELESP also aims to prepare its students to become both English language
users in professional fields and future English teachers. Therefore, besides mastering English reading, speaking, and listening skills, ELESP students surely
should be able to write various English written works that cover essential writing concepts they have learnt. It aims to make them be able to produce a good written
work, to guide as well as to educate other people or their future students to do so. In that case, writing a coherent written work, considered as a fundamental concept
in academic writing Murray Hughes, 2008 will therefore become an essential concept to consider by the students.
The elaboration and all aspects stated in the previous paragraphs certainly indicate that coherence in writing indeed becomes an essential issue to investigate
further. Therefore, this research specifically aimed to investigate coherence problems in academic essays written by students in an Academic Essay Writing
class. Eventually, the findings of the research were expected to provide both scientific contributions to the development of theories in English education as
well as practical contributions to the students, the lecturer in the Academic Essay Writing class and me, as a student in the graduate level and as an English teacher.
B. Problem Identification
Hyland 2002 points out that in many schools, students are asked to write merely to demonstrate the knowledge that they have in expressing facts, but they
8 only have little awareness of a reader. In that case, he asserts that grammatical
accuracy and clear exposition become the main criteria of good writing. In dealing with academic writing, the grammatical accuracy as well clear exposition
Hyland, 2002, however, will not become the only one-aspect that students need to consider. As it is stated previously, the concept of coherence becomes an
essential aspect that students need to consider when they produce their academic writing Murray Hughes, 2008.
Reflecting the importance of coherence in a written work, to the roles that the students have both as an ELESP student and as a future English teacher, the
fact that students still encountered some coherence problems in their written work as revealed by the previous related studies, this research asserts that coherence
becomes an important issue to investigate further. Specifically, this research addressed the same fundamental ideas as what the previous related research did. It
was to investigate the coherence problems in students’ written work.
Nevertheless, unlike the previous research, this research focused its analysis on argumentative essays, which were in the form of analytical exposition, written by
twenty students in an Academic Essay Writing class using a qualitative method, specifically a document analysis.
C. Limitation of the Research
The limitation of the research covered four main aspects. The first aspect dealt with approaches in researching writing. In relation to the approaches to
conduct a research in writing, Hyland 2002 suggests three different approaches, PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
9 namely texts, writers, and readers. The first approach aims to focus its analysis to
the products of writing. It specifically aims to see writing as a textual product, a coherent arrangement of elements structured based on a system of rules and either
to examine the formal surface structure or the discourse structure of particular texts. The second approach focuses its analysis on a writer rather than on the texts.
It addresses the general issue of what good writers do when they are challenged with a composing task as well as the methods that will help them obtain the skills.
The third approach discusses the role that readers play in writing and elaborates how writers engage with an audience in creating a text. Considering the
approaches Hyland, 2002, this research would only focus its analysis on particular texts, as stated by the first approach. More specifically, it would analyze
the argumentative essays written by the students and subsequently investigate the coherence problems in the essays based on the related theories of coherence that I
wrote in Chapter II. The second aspect was related to the selection of the research setting. The
limitation was due to such considerations as flexibility to conduct the research and accessibility to obtain the data to analyze. In that case, this research was
conducted at ELESP. Then, one Academic Essay Writing class held in semester five in the academic year 2013 2014 was chosen. The fact that I was an alumnus
of ELESP facilitated me to obtain a permission to conduct this research as well as to access the needed data effortlessly.
Meanwhile, the third aspect was related to types of essays to analyze. Based on the syllabus in the writing class Iswandari 2013, the students in
10 semester five at ELESP are required to write three different types of academic
essays. They are argumentative, comparison and contrast, and eventually problem and solution. In that case, I admitted that my position as a novice researcher as
well as the time limitation to conduct the research would not enable me to analyze those three types of essays. Therefore, this research would only analyze the
argumentative essay written by students in the Academic Essay Writing class. The essays were specifically in the form of analytical exposition. Besides, the essays
would be the final version of the students’ writing. In other words, the essays to analyze were those that have passed a drafting and revision process and have been
submitted to the lecturer in the writing class. The last aspect was concerned with numbers of academic essays to
analyze. In this research, only twenty argumentative essays were analyzed. The ground for the limitation was that the selected twenty essays were considered able
to provide rich data dealing with the coherence problems in the students’ essays.
D. Problem Formulation
