Premise: Journal of English Education and Applied Linguistics

PJEE e-ISSN: 2442-482x, p-ISSN: 2089-3345

https://fkip.ummetro.ac.id/journal/index.php/english
DOI: 10.24127/pj.v11i2.4744
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GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN STUDENTS'
UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

By
Ari Prasetyaningrum
English Department, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia
[email protected]

Maman Asrobi
English Department, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia
[email protected]

Siti Ayu Surayya

English Department, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia
[email protected]

Zahratul Fikni
English Department, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia
[email protected]

(Received:7-01-2022;Reviewed1:31-01-2022;Reviewed2:24-05-2022;Accepted:05-06-
2022;Published:10-06-2022)

Abstract
Halliday and Hasan (in 1976) put forward a new insight on cohesion in the field of discourse analysis in
which cohesion itself is divided into two they are lexical and grammatical cohesion, so based on this
fundamental study, the author conducted a study on cohesion, yet focused on grammatical cohesion. The
goal of this study was to determine the use of grammatical cohesion from the most dominant to the least
dominant types in undergraduate thesis belonged students of the study program of English language
education at Hamzanwadi university by M.A.K Halliday's theory. This study was classified into a
qualitative approach by applying content analysis. The author used documentation in the form of students'
undergraduate thesis for collecting the data. There were two kinds of data taken; namely, There are two
types of data: primary and secondary. The main data referred to the thesis written by the learners of the
eight semesters as their partial fulfillment task bachelor's degree. The secondary data was data that
complete the primary data. The author showed the data in line with Creswell and Poth's theory, in which
the author related the theory by examining the grammatical of the thesis. The research finding revealed
the most dominant type of grammatical cohesion was reference appeared 6149 times or 6,5, 29 %, then
conjunction, which was found 3107 times or 32, 99 %. Meanwhile, the least dominant types of
grammatical cohesion were substitution which appeared 145 times (1, 53%), and ellipsis, which appeared
16 times (0, 16%). This study implied that the learners should be careful in writing their undergraduate
thesis by noticing the language demonstrates the significance of the grammatical cohesion devices found
in English paragraphs that could assist the learner in writing a meaningful d meaningful thesis.
Key Words: Grammatical Cohesion; Students' undergraduate thesis
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How cite this article:
Prasetyaningrum, A., Asrobi, M., Surayya, S. A., & Fikni, Z. (2022). Grammatical cohesion
in students’ undergraduate thesis. Premise: Journal of English Education and Applied
Linguistics, 11(2), 297–315. https://doi.org/10.24127/pj.v11i2.4744
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Ari Prasetyaningrum, Asrobi, Surayya & Fikni

INTRODUCTION

Students from non-native English-speaking nations frequently regard writing as a problematic

English ability. Common writing barriers include organization, mechanics, content,
vocabulary, mind, and language use (Husin & Nurbayani, 2017). Apart from those vital
elements, coherence, and cohesion, lexical and grammatical aspects should be considered
(Ampa & Basri, 2019). Due to grammatical inhibition, the learners must focus on the writing
product and how they speak their minds and feelings in writing.
In Indonesia, English is being taught as a foreign language. Particularly in writing, the
learners are demanded to create a well-proportioned text that makes the readers undertake
easily (Abdullah et al., 2020; Hasan & Marzuki, 2017). In addition, university students should
communicate insight on a particular topic, some experts' theories, and arguments for
maintaining their original ideas in academic writing, like thesis writing as a final task.
The thesis is a partial requirement that must be submitted for a bachelor's degree in
Indonesia. Scholars state that a thesis as academic writing refers to a scientific process
conducted by a researcher to seek the results and findings of the research (Kusuma et al., 2022;
Thomas et al., 2015). The thesis deals with a series of research activities carried out by college
students who want to gain an undergraduate degree, which consists of specific theories and a
series of the authors' statements along with detailed explanations of findings and research
discussions conducted. Arranging a thesis is similar to a scientific paper, yet it is more
complicated as a comparison thesis is longer than an article (Ulugbek & Anora, 2020). All
Indonesian universities obliged thesis as a partial fulfillment to achieve a degree. The thesis
is usually called a research report because it must be completed through deep analysis, study,
and research. Before writing a thesis, all learners are required to submit a research proposal
(Ristekdikti, 2019). By following several research designs, university students could get detail
description dealing with their future research. The author should use what is known as
cohesiveness to connect ideas in a text to improve the accuracy of the sentences. as well as
create texture to the whole passages (Emilia et al., 2018). The text should have "texture," as
stated by Halliday and Hasan(1976) in that a text's unity should be based on a solid tie to the
texture. The nature of texture is ideal for conveying the devices of a specific text. The
existence of texture is a must in a text to make it different from non-text papers. Texture from
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a text plays a role in uniting the context. Texture, meaning found within a text, is called
cohesion (Ardi et al., 2020).
Cohesion refers to the bond of the meaning of a text through lexical items or non-
structural properties. Cohesion exists when interpretations among some discourse elements
rely on each other. Then, it could be concluded that an element strengthens each other
(Dascalu et al., 2018; Nirwanto, 2021). Preceding resources cannot understand as a particular
element. Moreover, semantics becomes the basic concept that refers to the meaning
relationship present in a text (Gao et al., 2017). Cohesion is a connector linking a sentence to
another in the text. Cohesion as a text feature appears due to meaning or grammatical cohesion
(Afrianto, 2017).
Wahyuni & Oktaviany (2021 ) states that grammatical cohesion is defined as specific
grammatical devices linked around the sentence bounds. Those features are the main factors
in understanding the interrelatedness and integration of the passage. (Muttaqin et al., 2021)
states that grammatical cohesion must be found in all text genres because it will connect the
first paragraph to the next one. It is because a text may be continuities, series, and
comprehensible. Furthermore, grammatical cohesion will improve readers' understanding of
the paper that the author writes. If a text is written without grammatical cohesion, surely the
readers will be baffling.
It is a significant duty to ensure that sentences in the text are connected. As a result,
university students should be able to comprehend the lesson of coherence and a component of
cohesion, namely grammatical cohesion. (Emilia et al., 2018) . Grammatical cohesion refers
to cohesion achieved by the use of grammar. This device is concerned with the fundamental
building of links or devices used to connect words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. It is a
valid connector among devices that present later with previous devices.
Reference, substitutes, ellipsis, and conjunction are four forms of cohesive grammatical
devices. (Amperawaty & Warsono, 2019). These devices are essential in bridging the gap
between written and verbal communication. As a result, it is suggested that the university
learners be familiar with the types and functions of every grammatical cohesion device. They
are applied well in written and spoken discourse; cohesive grammatical devices could connect
sentences and paragraphs structurally, and there will be no disparity between an idea in a
sentence and a paragraph (Anwar, 2017). It creates not only structural sentences but also
decreases puzzling when grasping the text message. That is why grammatical cohesion should
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be taken into account.

The learners who write a thesis must be guided and advised well so that their results may
become proof as qualified as their hope. A sentence to the other should be integrated
(Greetham, 2019). If the ideas, thoughts, and words are just scribbled down without being
adequately related, the reader will be perplexed when trying to understand the writer's
message.
As stated in the previous explanation, the author is inspired to analyze grammatical
cohesion in an undergraduate thesis. The learners accomplished the thesis chosen in this study
in the English language study program at Hamzanwadi University in the academic year of
2020-2021 because it is the final task that university students must accomplish. As a research
paper, a thesis demands them to convey acceptable arguments and conduct research to prove
hypotheses and assumptions.
A written discourse that all university students must carry out is the thesis (Badenhorst
et al., 2015). Furthermore, English education study programs that graduate future competent
teachers in their majoring knowledge oblige students to arrange a thesis as a final task. The
thesis covers several paragraphs and sections that should be coherent, and the meaning related
to text formation could be arranged systematically (Mim et al., 2019). Due to thorough and
integrated discourse, a thesis has described complete and fused aspects called cohesion and
coherence (Sari et al., 2018). In order to create a proper discourse requires an ability to know
and apply proper cohesion and coherence. Otherwise, the details to be carried through the
thesis would be ambiguous to the readers.
A qualified thesis must be written in the appropriate and coherent language and proper
style and follow the citation rules (Hart, 2018). In terms of methodology, a thesis has to be
created with an excellent formal academic method. Moreover, a thesis should have an
analytical legible arrangement and elaboration, which must always ease the readers'
comprehension of the logic presented in the thesis (Swarni, 2016). The learners of colleges
or universities have to finalize their graduate education to gain one degree; all learners are
required to write a thesis as a final assignment. Thus, the author believed that during thesis
writing, there must be specific research and explain research findings and discussion as well.
Thus, it could be concluded that thesis is finishing task for the learners who want to gain
bachelor degree.
The thesis contains a sequence of chapters and subheadings on the whole page as a
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written discourse. Introduction, literature review, research methodology, findings and

discussion, and conclusion and suggestion are the five chapters of the English education study
program at Hamzanwadi university thesis. However, not all of the thesis created by the
learners have well-written cohesion (Vivian, 2018). The sentences and paragraphs are not
cohesive in the learners' thesis. The author put a serious concern because a thesis relates to a
scientific paper that needs the use of rules of language and thorough aspects of writing as a
reasonable requirement of a qualified scientific paper and beneficial to the readers.
The author focused on analyzing the types and usage of cohesive devices found in the
undergraduate thesis written by English education study program learners at Hamzanwadi
University in 2020-2021. Data analysis is based on the theory of Halliday and Hasan (1976)
and notes the percentage of cohesion found in the thesis. In line with the study background,
the author formulates a problem statement to determine the use of grammatical cohesion
types from the most dominant to the least dominant in the undergraduate thesis written by
the students of Hamzanwadi University English education study program.

METHOD
Design
This research is categorized into a qualitative approach. The type of qualitative approach
that the author applied is discourse analysis. The content analysis technique is used to classify
certain types of cohesive devices chosen by the participants in arranging the whole of a thesis.
The author chose a qualitative approach meaning the data is presented in the form of words
instead of a set of numbers. This research method is applied to written or visible subject matters
to analyze the characteristics of an object.

Participants

The participants in this research are the ten undergraduate students of the Faculty of Langauge,
Arts, and Humaniora, English education study program, Hamzanwadi University, who wrote
an undergraduate thesis in the range year 2020-2021

Instrument and data source

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The author used an instrument for data collection. In this study, the writer took students'
undergraduate thesis and chose the background of the study, theoretical framework, research
method, findings & discussion, as well as the conclusion & suggestion of the Faculty of
Language, Art, and humanities as a written transcript.

This study's data came from academic writing by students in Hamzanwadi University's
English language education program's eighth semester in the academic year 2020-2021, and it
is an undergraduate thesis. A thesis must be accomplished and fulfilled by students as a partial
requirement for a bachelor's degree. The grammatical cohesion devices in ten theses were
examined. One set of data was used as the data source.

The study then divided the data into primary and secondary data. "primary data" refers
to the first and principal data relevant to the current inquiry. The primary data was a thesis
written by the eight-semester students as their obligatory task. The secondary task supported
and contributed the primary data like thesis, internet sources, journals, and articles.

Data Collecting Technique

Collecting data is a crucial step of the present study. For this rationale, the author
determined the proper procedures to collect data. There are three procedures to collect data in
descriptive qualitative research: documentation, interview, and questionnaire. The author chose
the documentation technique (students' undergraduate thesis) for data collection. (Mohajan,
2018) states documentation is a data collection technique that straight research subject directly.
Documentation is a written record of previous occurrences, such as a manuscript or a literary
work. Documentation was used To determine the performance of pupils' writing. Meanwhile,
to gather data for this study, the author set up a meeting with the eight-semester students under
their thesis advisors and requested permission to borrow their thesis, after which the author
made copies of the thesis. The author used primary data from university students' theses,
particularly documents.

Data Analysis Technique

The author used Creswell and Poth's theory to conduct data analysis. The author
described and related Creswell's theory about data analysis by assessing the grammatical

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cohesiveness in students' thesis (Creswell & Poth, 2016). It involves using Creswell's theory to
categorize data using grammatical cohesion devices. The author took the procedures as follows:
classifying some paragraphs containing grammatical cohesion in the entire undergraduate thesis
and splitting them into short sentences. Next, the author chose and marked several words with
grammatical cohesion devices in each sentence of any single paragraph. The next step was
classifying into types of grammatical cohesion. The author holds specific codes to facilitate
analyzing and classifying the learners' thesis. The whole citation model follows the offline
Mendeley desktop(Turmudi, 2020)

Table 1 List of Grammatical Cohesion Coding Aspect

No Aspect Code
1. Reference Per ref
Dem Ref
Comp Ref
2. Substitution Nom sub
Clau sub
Verb sub
3 Ellipsis Nom el
Clau el
Verb el
4 Conjunction Add conj
Adv conj
Cau conj
Temp conj

Then, using percentages, determine the number of grammatical coherence devices

identified in learner-written theses. Grammatical cohesion will be measured as a percentage to
examine the use of grammatical cohesion kinds that are commonly used and those that are rarely
used in students' theses. The researcher uses percentage and calculation tables to identify
grammatical cohesion devices and follows this simple formula to count and analyze data:

𝐹
𝑃= 𝑥100%
𝑁

P: The percentage of grammatical coherence in total.

F: Each sort of grammatical cohesion's frequency.

N: The number of grammatical cohesion devices in total

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RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Results

Types of Grammatical Cohesive Devices

This study aimed to look at the most common and least common grammatical coherent
devices discovered in 10 theses from Hamzanwadi University's English education study
program's eighth semester. Research findings revealed that the most dominant type of cohesive
grammatical device was reference which appeared 6149 times or 65, 29 %, succeeded by
conjunction appearing 3107 times or 32, 99%. Meanwhile, substitution (1, 53%) and ellipsis
(0, 16 %) were the least dominant types of cohesive grammatical devices. Here, students'
grammatical cohesion was analyzed by applying Halliday's theory. Then, the author presented
findings on cohesive grammatical devices commonly found in the ten students' thesis. The
author compiled the data and counted every device type through specific codes written under
each sentence having cohesive grammatical devices.

Furthermore, the table below shows the number of times coherent grammatical devices
appeared in the thesis and the proportion of times they appeared. The cohesive grammatical
devices written in the thesis and shown in the data were reference, substitution, ellipsis, and
conjunction, with reference being the most commonly utilized. Reference took the top position
in grammatical cohesion, followed by conjunction in the second rank. Then, substitution took
the third position, and the last was ellipsis, meaning the participants rarely used those two types
of cohesive devices.

Reference

The study result showed 9417 cohesive grammatical devices in 10 participants'

undergraduate thesis. Four types of cohesive grammatical devices could be found, including
reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction.

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This study is meant to reveal the most dominant and the least dominant grammatical
cohesive devices in the undergraduate thesis of the eight-semester students at Hamzanwadi
University. The findings proved that reference was the most dominant grammatical cohesive
device in the participants' thesis among the other types of cohesive grammatical devices. The
result showed 6149 times appearances or 65, 29%. Personal reference, which appeared 1092
times, demonstrative reference 4455 times, and comparative reference 602 times, were among
the three reference subtypes. The reference occurs 6149 times, accounting for 65.9% of all
coherent grammatical devices. As a result, reference ranked top among all coherent
grammatical devices, with three types: personal reference, demonstrative reference, and
comparison reference. The frequency and percentage of each reference form are shown in the
table below.

Table 2 Number of Occurrence and Percentage of Reference Types

No Reference Types Occurrences Percentage
1 Personal Reference 1092 17, 75%
2 Demonstrative Reference 4455 72, 45%
3 Comparative Reference 602 9, 79%
Total 6149 100%

Table 2 above shows that the types of reference found in the participants' thesis were
6149 occurrences. The demonstrative reference came in leading place with 4455 occurrences
(72.45%), followed by personal reference with 1092 occurrences (17.75%) and comparative
reference with 602 occurrences (9.79%).

Conjunction

The second position in conjunction includes additive, adversative, causal, and temporal
conjunction, which appeared 3107 times or 32, 99%, including four subtypes of conjunction.
For instance, the additive conjunction appeared 2189 times, the adversative conjunction 146
times, the causal conjunction 323 times, and the temporal conjunction 449 times. In the table
below, a detailed description is provided.

Table 3 Number of Occurrences and Conjunction Type Percentages

No Conjunction Types Occurrence Percentage
(Sentence)
1 Additive Conjunction 2189 70, 45%
2 Adversative Conjunction 146 4, 49%
3 Causal conjunction 323 10, 39%
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4 Temporal conjunction 449 14, 45%

Total 3107 100%

The most prevalent type of conjunction, according to the table above, is additive
conjunction, which appears 2189 times, or 70.45% of the time., followed by temporal
conjunction, which appears 449 times or 14.45% of the time, causal conjunction, which appears
323 times or 10, 39% of the time, and adversative conjunction, which appears 146 times or 4,
49% of the time. There have been 3107 occurrences of all forms of conjunctions in total.

Substitution

The third position is a substitution, which appears 145 times (1.53 percent) in students'
thesis and covers three subcategories of replacement: nominal substitution (117 times), verbal
substitution (26 occurrences), and clausal substitution (two occurrences). In students' theses,
the last rank is an ellipsis, which appears 16 times or 0.16 percent of the time, with three
subtypes: nominal ellipsis, which appears four times, verbal ellipsis, which appears two times,
and clausal ellipsis, which appears ten times.

Substitution occurs less frequently than conjunction, and it occurred 145 times,
accounting for 2.35 percent of all occurrences. Nominal, verbal, and clausal substitution are the
three types of substitution. In the table below, the statement was presented.

Table 4 Number of Occurrence and Percentage of Substitution in Students’ Thesis

No Types of substitution Occurrence (sentences) Percentage
1 Nominal substitution 117 80, 68%
2 Verbal substitution 26 17, 93%
3 Clausal substitution 2 1, 37%
Total 145 100%

Table 4 above presents the kinds of substitution item occurrences. The amount of
nominal substitution is 117 occurrences and got the first rank of substitution items. Next, it was
followed by verbal substitution with 26 occurrences and clausal substitution with two
occurrences.

Ellipsis

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Compared to the other types of cohesive grammatical features, an ellipsis is the less
frequent type and less dominantly used in students' thesis, reaching 16 occurrences or 0, 16%.
Ellipsis covers nominal, verbal, and clausal ellipsis. The detailed description can be seen as
follow.

Table 5 The number of occurrences and percentages of different types of ellipses in students'
theses.
No Types of ellipsis Occurrence Percentages
1 Nominal ellipsis 4 25%
2 Verbal ellipsis 2 12, 5%
3 Clausal ellipsis 10 62, 5%
Total 16 100%

According to table 4, the clausal ellipsis is the most common type of ellipsis used by
students in their theses, which appears ten times (62.5%), followed by a nominal ellipsis, which
appears four times (25%), and verbal ellipsis, which appears twice. There are a total of 16
ellipsis instances.

Discussion

This research aims to determine how grammatical cohesion types are used from the
most dominant to the least dominant in an undergraduate thesis written by students in the eighth
semester of Hamzanwadi University's English education study program. The results show that
reference 6149 occurrences (65, 29 %) was the most common, followed by conjunction 3107
occurrence (32, 99 %, and substitution 145 occurrences (1,53 %) and ellipsis 16 occurrence
were the least common (0, 16 %).

The author employed past relevant studies as a comparison. The first relevant study that
validated this conclusion was conducted (by Wahyuni and Amperawati (2021), who also
discovered that reference was the most commonly used grammatical type. The Lion King movie
script contains many aspects such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, repetition,
synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and collocation, and they are all sorts of lexical and
grammatical cohesiveness. Although Wahyuni and Amperawati looked at a movie script, it
appeared that reference was the most common grammatical reference found. Reference was the
reason cohesive grammatical devices were found in The Lion King movie script and
undergraduate thesis because reference refers to someone or something.

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The second relevant study was conducted by Muttaqin, Saleh, and Hartono (2021), who
analyzed students' project proposals. However, their findings showed that grammatical
conjunction was the most commonly used grammatical cohesion with 238 occurrences. In
contrast, grammatical reference was 235 times, grammatical ellipsis was 13 times, and
grammatical substitution was only six times. Although the previous research and the present
study analyzed a final project done by university students, the author found that grammatical
cohesion research findings were dissimilar. The previous research analyzed grammatical
cohesion in smaller scope than the author. The previous study did not examine the fourth and
fifth chapters that need many references to refer to theories to strengthen the findings spread in
chapter four.

On the other hand, the author made a breakthrough by studying grammatical cohesion.
The study covered the whole chapter of the thesis instead of the movie script and Student final
project proposal like the previous studies to find the level of cohesive grammatical spread
among the five chapters of the thesis. The research on grammatical cohesion was the first time
conducted in this province. However, the drawback of this study was analyzing grammatical
cohesion only without examining the errors and students' ability to use grammatical cohesion.
The similarity in the grammatical cohesion findings was caused by the same format used to
arrange a thesis manual from beginning to end. The students produced similar grammatical
cohesion to connect each sentence or make specific references. Nevertheless, the student's level
of mastery of the accuracy of grammatical cohesion in the thesis is determined by the
employment of cohesive grammatical devices.

The reference becomes the prime factor the students produced in the thesis chapter.
Reference cohesion is a grammatical cohesion in which a lingual unit refers to other lingual
units that came before and after it. (Muhyidin et al., 2020). This cohesion connects a text
element with other things related to the element or things to be referred to. The reference refers
to the relationship between a word and an object. Such as it, you, his, and their. Then Gerrot
and Wignell (as cited in Rofiq'ah, 2019) say reference deals with the sequence order that
initiates and identifies the participants throughout the book. It also has anything to do with
textual meaning and manner. Among the three types of reference, the students most commonly
used demonstrative reference in the whole thesis, especially in the background of study and
literature review subsection, instead of personal references (Galvan & Galvan, 2017). It means

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that in most of the paragraphs, there were oral appointments in which the speakers show the
reference by placing him in scale distance. That is because the research object was a scientific
thesis that contained many theories from books, scientific papers, and other sources. They were
suitable to a specific subject matter and field of study as well as personal argument, which
provides a description and summary related to the research problems being elaborated, so
personal reference use such as he, she, or I am minimized (Biggam, 2018).

Furthermore, the background and literature review section is meant to describe a review
of literature that an author has investigated when studying a particular topic. The finding on a
reference as the most dominant grammatical cohesion was also proved in research by (Puteri
et al., 2018) from Universitas Negeri Padang, Indonesia, entitled grammatical cohesion in the
thesis. The results showed that there were grammatical cohesion signals from dominant to least
used in 192 paragraphs with 362 pairs of sentences: (1) references, (2) conjunction, (3) ellipsis,
and (4) substitution.

The second dominantly conjunctive or sequential cohesion comes from a grammatical

cohesion that expresses a particular relation of meaning (Huneety et al., 2017). Because a bit of
relation in discourse is the sentence, the author examines the conjunction connecting the
intercoastal, not between words or phrases. Conjunction contrasts identity from the rest of
cohesive relations: reference, substitution, and ellipsis (Khudhair, 2017). Conjunctive devices
are not straight cohesive yet ambiguous. A conjunction is a resource to make a flow of ideas in
the development of the text. Conjunction relations identify the process in which what follows
in a paragraph is connected to what has been stated before based on their particular
interpretation (Darweesh & Kadhim, 2016). They are not devised to track the proceeding or the
succeeding text but to convey specific meanings involving other discourse components
(Chatman, 2021).

Furthermore, conjunction deals with the text's connective of the sentence, paragraph, and
clause. The conjunctions were most common in chapter II or the literature review. They were
dominated by additive conjunctions, which meant that most of the text contained extra
information without moving the ideas from the last phrase or clause. (Afzaal et al., 2019). It
could be understood since literature review discusses the subject matters belonging to other
researchers to counter plagiarism, track intermission between researches, give confession to
previous researchers, deficiency in previous studies, provide problems for the following
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researchers, and propose necessity for future research, relate the works in the context of its
contribution to the study areas which require interconnection among ideas and arguments of the
writers and the previous theories. As was supported by (Anwar, 2017), conjunction is usually
encountered in students' academic writing as a reference. The findings demonstrate that various
cohesive devices, such as grammatical and lexical cohesion, were discovered in undergraduate
thesis abstracts. The abstract form of conjunction is the most common. Conjunctions accounted
for 112 of the total cohesive devices or 45 percent.

Substitution occurs when one object is replaced with another. (Parazaran & Motahari,
2015) . It signifies that substitution is the alteration of a word, phrase, clause, or sentence related
to the previously mentioned word, phrase, clause, or sentence. Substitution is a word-to-word
relationship rather than a meaning-to-meaning one. It is also a type of counter that keeps track
of how often something is done. The nominal substitution was the commonest found, defined
as an alteration of a lingual unit categorized as nominal with other lingual elements having a
similar category (Wahyuni & Oktaviany, 2021). Substitute one/ones (singular/plural), and same
are widely used to sign it.

On the other hand, one serves not only as a substitute but also as a personal pronoun,
cardinal number, determiner, and general noun or pronoun. While conjunction was found
almost dominantly in the second chapter, substitution spread equally in the whole thesis chapter.
Substitution is one of grammatical cohesion which is rarely produced in formal writing
(Martinez Lirola & Irwin, 2016). It was backed up by Rahman, who conducted a study called
"Investigation of grammatical cohesion on students' academic essays," which found that
reference (56,3%) was the most common grammatical cohesive element utilized by students in
academic essay writing compared to other types. Substitution, on the other hand, was the least
common (0.5%). (Rahman, 2017).

Ellipsis is the component of substitution where the item is not modified. Ellipsis occurs
when a sentence or clause loses several essential systemic elements that can only be restored
by referencing a previous text item (Adiantika & Floranti, 2018). The most common ellipsis
observed was clausal ellipsis within the clause (Bahaziq, 2016). In English, a clause is viewed
as the interpretation of different speech purposes, such as a statement, question, response, and
so forth. It has modal and a propositional element as part of the clausal ellipsis order (Maulida

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Ari Prasetyaningrum, Asrobi, Surayya & Fikni

& Nugraha, 2020). Clausal ellipsis was commonly found in chapter four when the students
wrote some clips about the sentence examples they found in the sample's writing tasks.

The abundant grammatical cohesive devices of this undergraduate thesis cause the
author to take a long time to demonstrate how the authors attempted to make their meanings
apparent, particularly by repeating references, conjunctions, ellipsis, and substitution in places
where cohesive grammatical devices are required. The readers would undoubtedly find the
thesis understandable if those unified indications offered by the learners were used. As
previously said, the background of study, theoretical framework, research methodology,
findings, and conclusions of research studies are the sequence of writing an undergraduate
thesis. It is easy to see how the linguistic signals established on the surface text can aid readers
in absorbing the information presented. As a result, it is reasonable to argue that the
employment of these ties contributes to the overall undergraduate thesis's general coherence.

CONCLUSION

Referred to the findings and discussions, we conclude that the learners' undergraduate
thesis has all grammatical cohesion features. Personal reference, demonstrative reference,
comparative reference, verbal substitution, nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, clausal ellipsis,
additive conjunction, adversative conjunction, causal conjunction, and temporal conjunction
are the eleven cohesive mechanisms in grammatical cohesion. The most commonly utilized
grammatical types were reference and conjunction, and substitution and ellipsis are the least
common. Grammatical cohesion must be understood because it is essential to connect proper
sentences and enable people to write systematically. The factor why there are a lot of cohesive
grammatical devices found in the undergraduate thesis was reference because reference refers
person. Conjunction can connect two sentences to make both sentences meaningful.
Substitution can be used to substitute words, groups, or clauses. Ellipsis because it used to omit
words or clauses to avoid repetition.

Before writing the thesis, some suggestions may be proposed first, and students are
expected to pay attention carefully to the aspect of grammatical cohesion besides other aspects.
It ensures that what is written is meaningful to the readers and corresponds to the author's
intentions. Second, it is suggested that the subsequent researchers examine the accuracy of
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Ari Prasetyaningrum, Asrobi, Surayya & Fikni

grammatical and lexical cohesion in students' thesis describing the educational context and
literary discourse, so the cohesion difference in the academic and literary thesis will be seen.

BIO-PROFILE
Ari Prasetyaningrum is a lecturer in the department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Education, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia. Her research interests include English
writing, teaching strategy, and discourse. ORCHID-ID: 0000-0002-5925-2232. Corresponding
Email: [email protected]
Maman Asrobi is a lecturer in the department of English, Faculty of Art and Humanities
Education, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia. His research interests are English
language teaching, technology in English Language Teaching, and Assessment of English
Language Teaching.
Siti Ayu Surayya is a lecturer in the department of English, Faculty of Art and Humanities
Education, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia. Her research interests are teachers'
competency, educational technology, and teachers' motivation.
Zahratul Fikni is a lecturer in the department of English, Faculty of Art and Humanities
Education, HAMZANWADI UNIVERSITY, Indonesia. Her research interests are assessment
and methods in language teaching.

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