speak intensively in the first semester in intensive speaking class, second semester in interpersonal and transactional conversation, and third semester in speaking for general
purposes class. In addition, other subjects which they have joined in the college, support them in speaking.
However, although cohesion is taught from junior high school, the students of English Department still face problem in applying cohesive devices. It was proved by
Sri Suprapti 2009 who did the research by using the junior students of English Department of UNNES as the subject. In the research, she concluded that there were
some cohesive problems in the investigated data both of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. The problems in the grammatical cohesion could be sub-categorized
into: a wrong use of conjunction; b wrong use of demonstratives; c wrong use of pronominals. Then, the lexical cohesion problems are in forms of a lexical repetition
with irretrievable referents within the texts; b naming: the use of a more specific term subordinate term in place of a more general super-ordinate one.
From the above consideration, it is essential to acknowledge to what extent the third semester students
’ speeches are cohesively produced, especially the unified text, using cohesive devices, and what kinds of devices are found in their speeches.
1.2 Reason for Choosing the Topic
Some reasons why I chose the topi c “Cohesion in Students’ Speeches The Case of the
Third Semester English Language Students of UNNES ” are:
Cohesion is an important element that should be used in speaking. It is needed since it can help hearer to understand the text easily. The students of English
department are expected to create a cohesive speaking because they have learned speaking intensively. Moreover, they also joined paragraph based writing that trained
them to make good paragraph which is cohesive. According to Boardman 2001:36, another characteristic of a good paragraph is cohesion. When a paragraph has cohesion,
all the supporting sentence “stick together” in their support of the topic sentence. The methods of connecting sentences to each other are called cohesive devices.
I consider that cohesion is very important in English students ’ speaking, in this
case, is speech, therefore, I want to know to what extent the third students ’ speeches
are cohesively produced.
1.3 Research Problems
The research problems of this study are: 1.
To what extent are the speeches produced by the third semester English language students cohesive?
2. What kinds of cohesive devices are found in their speeches?
1.4 Objectives of the Study
The objective of the study can be stated as follows: 1.
To identify whether the speeches produced by the third semester English language students are cohesive or not.
2. To describe the kinds of cohesive devices found in their speeches.
1.5 Significance of the Study
This study hopefully will give some significances to the readers. The significances are described as follows:
1. Theoretical significance
The result of the research will provide information about cohesive devices used by the third semester students of English Department of UNNES. Besides that,
the result of the research can be used to be an additional reference for further researchers especially those who are interested in discourse analysis within the
same field. 2.
Practical significance The research finding will help students to understand the role of cohesive
devices in unified discourse and how they structure a boundary of a text discourse.
1.6 Limitation of the Study
