This research aimed to explain the kinds of grammatical cohesion found in the students’ essay writing and to explain the dominant types of grammatical cohesion most used in students’ essay writing. This study applied descriptive qualitative method. The object of the study were 33 essays which written by the fourth semester students English Education Department of UIN Walisongo in academic year of 2017/2018. The data were collected through documentation and interview. Furthermore, the data were analyzed content analysis proposed by John W Cresswell. The technique of analysis involved organizing, reading, coding, making interpretation, and counting the grammatical cohesion devices. The writer used M.A.K Halliday and Hasan’s theory to analyze the types of grammatical cohesion which are reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. To find the results the researcher used tabulation in counting the data, then the results showed that there are 703 times or 61.35 % of reference, 27 times or 2.35% of substitution, 12 times or 1.15 % of ellipsis, 403 times or 35.15 % of conjunction, and the total 1.145 times of grammatical cohesion devices from 33 of the students’ essay writing. It can be concluded that the dominant types used in students’ essays writing are reference and conjunction. Meanwhile, Substitution and ellipsis are lower than reference and conjunction in the students’ essay writing. It can also be mentioned that students only focus on two types of grammatical cohesion. It can make their essays not cohesive, because in their essay only 2 dominant types of cohesion are used.