The Contribution of Lexical Cohesion to the Text Cohesion in EFL Students’ Expository Texts

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the use of lexical cohesion in students’ expository texts. It reveals thetypes of lexical cohesion employed by the students in their expository texts and the contribution oflexical cohesion to the text’ cohesion. This study employs qualitative research by using a case studydesign. Nine students of twelfth grade in a public senior high school in Kuningan regent, West Java,are chosen as the participants. The data in this study include the documents of students’ expositorytexts. The data are analyzed by using the concept of cohesive devices proposed by Halliday andHasan (1976). The findings show that there are two lexical cohesions identified in nine students’expository texts i.e. reiteration (covering i.e. antonymy, repetition, synonymy, meronymy, andhyponymy) and collocation. This study also indicates that lexical cohesion contribute to the processof keeping track of the participants and engaging the readers to the core argument of the text.Moreover, it can be stated that the contribution of lexical cohesion towards students’ expositorytexts is considered low. Therefore, there must be an encouragement for the students to use properlexical cohesion to make their text more cohesive.