Functions of Cohesion in Reading Text Comprehension

Cohesion is important to know the connection of meaning between words or sentences in a text. This study is purposed to know the cohesive devices used in the descriptive text within a 7th grade student’s textbook and to know how the cohesion can build the understanding of the descriptive text in reading comprehension. This qualitative research used document analysis, literature review, observation and interviews to gather the data. The findings showed that the descriptive text has utilized grammatical and lexical cohesion to unify the words and sentences. Researchers only found reference, substitution, conjunction as grammatical cohesion, and reiteration as lexical cohesion. In addition, interviews with the apprentice teacher which aimed to find out the implementation of cohesion to teach descriptive text show that it was only explained to help students know the meaning of the text and comprehend it. To conclude, cohesive devices are crucial to be learnt and taught to know the link between the sentences, as well as understand the elements of grammatical and lexical cohesion.