The background of the study in this research is based on the phenomena that textbook has a great role in teaching learning. Every textbook has many sentences. We can see how the structuring of the sentences has implications for units such as paragraph and for the progression of the whole texts. Cohesion allows readers to read smoothly because it links between the clause and sentence of the text. Cohesion of a text will lead to a better comprehension. In this study, the writer choose cohesion of recount text because it is one of the genres that must be mastered by Tenth Year Students of Senior High School as stated in curriculum.
The problem of this research can be stated: How is the cohesiveness of recount texts in Look Ahead English textbook for tenth grade published by Erlangga?
The objective of this study is to find out the cohesiveness of recount texts in Look Ahead English textbook of Senior High School published by Erlangga.
This study is a library research. In carrying out the analysis, the writer took seven recount texts from the textbook as the object of analysis. Then the writer divided into clauses in order to find the cohesive devices (including grammatical or lexical cohesion). Next, each clause was identified in terms of both. First, grammatical cohesion they are reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Second, lexical cohesion they are reiteration and collocation. Then, the writer put the number of cohesive devices in the form of percentage. Finally, the writer made an interpretation based on the result.
In the first recount text, the percentage calculations of grammatical cohesion were 75.86% and the lexical cohesion was 81.82%. However, in the second recount text, the percentage of grammatical cohesion was higher than the lexical cohesion. It was 74.89%. Meanwhile, the lexical cohesion was 66.67%. In the third text, the lexical cohesion was the highest, 100%. The grammatical cohesion was 65%. In the fourth and fifth texts, the dominant cohesion was lexical cohesion. They were 75% and 63.33%. Meanwhile, the grammatical cohesion was 53.33% and 63.16%. Furthermore, in the sixth and seventh texts, the dominant cohesion was still lexical cohesion. They were 53.33% and 70%. The grammatical cohesion was only 46.67% and 40%.
The averages from all of recount texts are 59.86% for grammatical cohesion and 72.88% for lexical cohesion. From the calculation, it implies that the analyzed recount texts have good cohesion (according Hasan and Halliday’s theory: 51%-75% is good criterion) both grammatically and lexically because almost all the percentages show that the result is more than 50% for both grammatical and lexical cohesion.