Electronic Theses and Dissertation

The objectives of this research were to find out the types of cohesive devices used in the students’ writing compositions and to find out the types that became problematic for the students and the reasons why. this research was a qualitative study with the implementation of interactive model proposed by miles, huberman, and saldana (2014). the subjects of this study were 33 students at jeumala amal islamic boarding school. the instruments to collect the data were a writing assignment and interview. the findings showed that all of the five types of cohesive devices appeared in the students’ writings. the reference type occurred the most with the number of 2133 occurrences, followed by conjunction with 876 occurrences, lexical cohesion with 200 occurrences, ellipsis with 2 occurrences, and substitution with only one occurrence. this research also found that there were three types of cohesive devices that became problematic for the students. the three types were conjunction with 113 cases, reference with 67 cases and lexical cohesion with 31 cases. it was revealed that there were four reasons for the students’ difficulty in using cohesive devices appropriately. the three reasons were pure error, absence of knowledge, overuse, and the lack of writing practice.