Cohesion in Undergraduate Theses: A Discourse Analysis

As a productive skill, writing is closely linked to the use of cohesion properly. To this point, cohesion dealing with words and phrases establishes logical relationships among phrases or sentence boundaries. Accordingly, this research aims to find out (1) types of cohesion, (2) the most frequently used cohesion, and (3) university students' difficulties in applying types of cohesion in writing undergraduate theses. The method of this research is a discourse analysis that mainly focuses on an interrelated communication of ideas within parts of the theses. Using documents and interviews, the research data analysis is specifically concerned with 266 cohesion-related data pertaining to five types of cohesion, namely repetitions of key words (18%), use of reference words (12%), relevance (24%), order (26%), and linking or transition words (20%) in undergraduate theses. As the interview result indicates, such types of cohesion contribute to the development of ideas and specificities of lexical, syntactical and linguistic components in academic writing contexts, but the thesis writers find it hard to master the proposed topics and apply types of cohesion comprehensively.