Exploring Students' Competence in Mastering Cohesion

Cohesion is an important element in writing that must be fulfilled by students as competence to develop systematic and logical texts in expressing ideas. The paper describes the cohesion mastered by the students in writing narrative, recount, and report texts. It belongs to quantitative method. The data are authentic written data of grammatical and lexical cohesion mastered by the students in writing narrative, recount, and report texts. The writers analysed the students' written texts in terms of their cohesion employment. The paper reports the findings that all of cohesive devices are mastered by the students but in different intensity: the most dominant grammatical cohesive device used by the students is reference, while for that of lexical cohesive device is repetition. The students' competence in mastering cohesion is different from one text to another, but in general it is sufficient. Their competence in writing narratives is better than that in recounts and reports. It indicates that the students' narrative texts are readable than the other texts. Cohesion needs to be emphasized in teaching writing so that students can be competent in writing texts.