Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

The ability in communicating and interacting with others to express ideas and feelings is the main purpose in learning a language. It can be both spoken and written. Teaching a language means training students to be able to communicate in the language being taught. Teaching English as a second language has to meet its final objective i.e. students‟ competence in communication by using English either spoken or written. When people communicate, they negotiate meaning Agustien, 2004:1. Just something like transaction, they will make a deal if they understand each other. However, a negotiation sometimes does not occur due to misunderstanding. Therefore, communication, either written or spoken, must be managed well in order to avoid misunderstanding. Writing is one of the important language skills. Through writing, everyone can share hisher idea and when it is read by others, communication will occur. If someone can manage hisher writing well, she will be able to invite someone else to have understandable communication. In producing good writing in English, it is not only good in arranging words into grammatical sentences in the perspective of the existence of subject, verb, object and adverb in every sentence but also constructing cohesiveness between sentences and combining the sentences with the appropriate genre so that 1 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