The Coherence and Cohesion in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia

Pandiya An English teacher at the State Polytechnic of Semarang Abstract: This study is aimed to find out the coherence in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, and to find out the cohesion in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, and also to find out the different features of coherence and cohesion of the news texts. The data of the study is primary and qualitative coming from RRI Semarang as the form of tape scripts of English News Texts in Programa II. The purposive sampling technique is used for varying the topics of item of the English News Texts. The topics then cover politics, economy, social affairs, culture, religion, security, and others. Among four month editions (January April 2010), 15 item texts are selected for having the representative of data. The results showed that the topics of English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang are various. The topics of texts are then mostly dominated by social affairs while the topic of religion and politics are the least dominant. The coherence in the Written English News Texts of Programa II RRI Semarang is not fully significant. This is indicated by the fact that only 60 % of the texts can fulfill the schematic structure of news item. The cohesion in the Written English News Texts of Programa II RRI Semarang is not fully significant either. This is indicated by the fact that only 13.33 % of the texts can fulfill the cohesive devices. The item topic of economy has more features of coherence and cohesion than others, as it presents more detailed information, complete schematic structure of news item, logical order, good paragraph, and good and appropriate choice of words or diction. Key words: coherence, cohesion, written texts, cohesive devices, and English news. INTRODUCTION The linguists describe language as a means of communication. This is something fundamental about language. At least there are three theoretical views of language. The first is the view that language is a system of structurally related elements for the coding of meaning. The second is the functional view, i.e. language viewed as a vehicle for the expression of functional meaning. The third is interactional view, i.e. language viewed as a vehicle for the realization of interpersonal relations and for the performance of social transactions between individuals. Language is seen as a tool for the creation and maintenance of social relations (Richards and Rodgers, 1992: 17). This emphasizes the fundamental function of language universally, i.e. language as a means of communication. The position of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia nowadays is getting more and more important. This is indicated by the fact that English is as a compulsory subject not only in Junior High School and Senior High School, but also in Elementary School. Even English belongs to one of National Examination Subjects (UN = Ujian Nasional). Besides; it is also getting good position in Infant School or Kindergarten. All

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these facts make English as special attraction for people to study and or make researches. Learning English language nowadays becomes wider and wider, either spoken English or written English. This suits to the development of learning media in both classroom and outside classroom. The existence of media is something undeniable for not only formal learning at schools, but also for informal learning in daily life around the people/students. The media then relates to the printed out ones like newspapers, magazines, brochures, business reports, tabloids, and or some proses such as novels, poetry, biography, research journals, and stories. The other one is electronic media like radio, TV, and Internet. Though the media of radio is something conventional and traditional, the important role of radio for people in general is significant. This is indicated by the existence of radio station like VOA (Voice of America), BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), ABC (Australia Broadcasting Corporation), and RRI (Radio Republik Indonesia) as Government Radio Station and other particular radio stations for Indonesian people. The existence of RRI itself is solid, as it is legally acknowledged in the State Acts, especially UU No. 32/2002 about the State Broadcasting (Chapter III, Part IV, Article 14, and Verse 1-3). The importance of audio media/instrument (RRI) as one part of peoples media is still valid nowadays. This is supported by the survey of LMK (Lembaga Manajemen Komunikasi, 2002) that RRI is the most interesting media for the news and information. The news then is accurate and neutral (Sukowidodo, et al., 2003). And the next survey (2006) showed that 60.2 % of people are loyal listeners of RRI, that this acknowledges the existence of RRI. There are many programs in RRI Semarang, and one of them is English Time in Programa II. The English news is then as one element of English Time. The importance of news item as one of social and cultural systems of life for people in general is something significant. Any time people are surrounded by news item from either printed out newspapers, magazines, and tabloids, or electronic media via TV, internet, and radio. The English News Program as media to inform something to people seems to be an activity for sending messages to people, and this involves of either speaking activity or listening activity. Speaking activity refers to reading aloud of that news, while listening activity is from the aspect of people as listeners. Reading aloud of the tape scripts, i.e. the texts that are read by reporter/announcer. There must be any kind of coherence and cohesion in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang. And the role of coherence and cohesion in text writing is very important to create the good and appropriate text (Goh and Silver, 2004: 10). The existence of both coherence and cohesion will give easy understanding for either readers or listeners. The coherence refers to meaning while cohesion refers to form. Specifically for paragraph writing, there are some researches, such as Halliday and Hasan in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) about reference, substitutions, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion, and coherence, James in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) about coherence, Liu and Braine in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) about the use of cohesive devices, Connel in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) for Japanese students, Olsen in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) for Norwegian EFL learners, Sattayatham and Honsa Jr in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) for Medical students at Mahidol University Thailand, Screebenjabol in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) for the differences between English and Thai, Thananart in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) about comparison and contrast paragraph written by EFL students at Chulangkorn University, and Sattayatham and Honsa Jr in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) about errors in translating from Thai to English at the sentence level and the paragraph level, then the results showed that the most frequent errors were at the syntactic and lexical levels which led to the overgeneralization, incomplete rule application, and building of false concepts,

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mother-tongue interference as major cause of errors, and some linguistic items, such as articles, tenses, verb forms, appeared to be the source of the frequent errors. Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) in the research about analysis of errors in paragraph writing in English for Medical Students from four Medical Schools at Mahidol University found that most students did not present a reasonable connection or relation between ideas in their paragraphs which causes coherence breaks. Sasaki (2000) in his research titled Toward an Empirical Model of EFL Writing Processes: An Exploratory Study revealed that there must be a difference of the learners acquisition for three different groups, i.e. EFL writers of experts vs novices, more- vs less skilled student writers, and novices before and after 6 months of instruction. The items compared were writing fluency, quality/complexity of their written texts, their pausing behaviors while writing, and their strategy used. The results showed that a) before starting to write, the experts spent a longer time planning a detailed overall organization, whereas the novices spent a shorter time, making a less global plan; b) once the experts had made their global plan, they did not stop and think as frequently as the novices; c) L2 proficiency appeared to explain part of the difference in strategy use between the experts and novices; and d) after six months of instruction, novices had begun to use some of the expert writers strategies. It was also speculated that the experts global planning was a manifestation of writing expertise that cannot be acquired over a short period of time. In short, it is concluded that to be professional writers, people or students/learners take a long process and training. Yi (2010) carried out a slightly different research, i.e. Adolescent multilingual writers transitions across in- and out-of-school writing contexts, and revealed that the research participant greatly drew upon her voluntary, out-of-school writing for her Creative Writing class; and at the same time, her in-school writing activities and assignments were mentioned in out-of-school writing practices. This shows that her writing activities across in-and out-of-school contexts were influenced by each other, specially with respect to topics, genres, and languages of writing practices. The conclusion is then that there must be a correlation between writing practices in the class and outside the class. Macbeth (2010) in his research titled Deliberate false provisions: The use and usefulness of models in learning academic writing found that for language learners, a model essay provided relief from the vague terms and occult objects of what was for them a cultural curriculum. The model offered students something they could do to turn in an assignment on time. Models, however, work by displaying basic principles. They forfeit some things in order to make others vivid, and it is to this sparseness that they owe their pedagogical value. Students who understood the model as a right answer rather than a case, were led astray, and they then had to confront the betrayal. Ultimately, discovering the insufficiences of the model was important to the students development of competent academic writing. In conclusion, the appropriateness of providing model of essays is something important and useful. The research in the aspect of coherence and cohesion in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang is different from all the previous researches mentioned above, as this research/study focuses on the Written English News texts broadcast by Programa II RRI Semarang, and not related to the students work. Related to text, there are some definitions. James in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) the term of text used to refer exclusively to a unit of written language larger than the sentence for which paragraph might be suitable term. Connor in Sattayatham and Ratanapinyowong (2008) focuses on the aspect of cohesion in paragraph, and the aspect of coherence in discourse organization. Fairclough (1995: 4) describes the text traditionally understood to be a piece of written language a whole work such as a poem or a novel, or a relatively discrete part of a work such as a chapter. A rather broader conception has become common within discourse analysis where a text may be either written or spoken discourse, so that, for example, the words used in

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conversation, (or their written transcription) constitute a text. In cultural analysis, by contrast, texts do not need to be linguistic at all; any cultural artefact a picture, a building, a piece of music can be seen as a text. Analyzing texts, then claimed to be close analysis of texts as significant part of social scientific analysis of a whole range of social and cultural practices and processes (Fairclough 1995: 185-186). The texts in this research/study are limited in the Written English News Texts broadcast by Programa II RRI Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. This study is aimed to find out the aspect of coherence in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, and to find out the aspect of cohesion in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, and also to find out the different features of coherence and cohesion of the news texts. More importantly, this paper also comprises methods of investigation, the results and discussion of the study, and the conclusions of the study. METHODS OF INVESTIGATION This research is any kind of discourse analysis or discourse studies referring to a number of approaches to analyze written, spoken or signed language use (Wikipedia Dictionary in Saleh 2008: 75). Discourse studies also refer to a variety of procedures for examining chunks of language, whether spoken or written (Allwright and Bailey in Saleh 2008: 75). For this research, the discourse studies are focused on the document/file of tape scripts of English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, so this refers only to written texts of English. The source of data is the document/file of tape scripts of English News Texts broadcast by Programa II RRI Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The data is the paragraphs of news item of the document/file of tape scripts of English News Texts broadcast by Programa II RRI Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia in four month edition, i.e. from January to April 2010. Thus, the data belongs to written English or written language. The data is primary as it is taken authentically and directly from RRI Semarang. The data also tends to be qualitative as it is the form of texts of English News. As the edition of English News Texts is from January to April 2010, 15 news texts are selected to represent the data. In this case, the purposive sampling technique is used for having the variety of items or topics. The topics then refer to politics, economy, social affairs, culture, religion, security, and others. The analysis of data focuses on the aspect of coherence and cohesion in paragraph writing. Coherence is something referring to meaning, while cohesion is something referring to form. Cohesive devices comprise the aspect of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. The lexical cohesion itself refers to reiteration and collocation. All data then provided in tables in accordance with the kind of those two aspects. Besides; the English News Texts have the structure of news item genre. Therefore, the analysis focuses on schematic structure as follows: Headline eye catching title Summary of Event a summary recount of newsworthy event Background Events elaboration of what happened, to whom, in what circumstances Sources comments by participants or authorities on the subject. This analysis is based on the theory of the model of language, specially genre and register (Hammond et al. 1992: 84-85). The analysis is also done by referring to the theory of a good and appropriate paragraph described by Oshima and Hogue (2006: 2-37). They suggested that a good and appropriate paragraph should have the elements of topic sentence, supporting sentences, concluding sentence, unity, and coherence. They also described that a

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paragraph has common kinds of logical order, i.e. chronological order, logical division of ideas, and comparison/contrast. The assessment is then the determination of the texts whether fulfilling or not fulfilling the criteria of schematic structure of news item texts, a good and appropriate paragraph, and appropriate logical order. THE RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS Item grouping relates to the topics of item of English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang, i.e. politics, economy, social affairs, culture, religion, security, and others. These topics of item are showed in table 1 as follows: Table 1: Item Grouping and Percentages No. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Topics of Item Politics Economy Social Affairs Culture Religion Security Others Total Total of Texts 1 3 8 -1 2 -15 Percentage 6.67% 20% 53.33% -6.67% 13.33% -100%

As can be seen in table 1, the first rank of topics is social affairs (53.33%), the second is economy (20%), the third is security (13.33%), the fourth is politics (6.67%), and the last is religion (6.67%). Based on the data available, it is concluded that social affairs are the most dominant of the topics, and religion and politics are the least dominant of the topics. Among all item topics of the texts, the topic of economy has more features of coherence and cohesion than other topics. This is identified by providing the detailed information of the texts, complete schematic structure of news item, chronological order (logical order), significant coherence and cohesion, complete components of good paragraph, and good and appropriate choice of words or diction. The following are the examples of texts the topic of which is economy: Traders suffer losses from a three-day blackout in Yogyakarta (1) Textile traders of Beringharjo traditional market in Yogyakarta have been suffering losses from a three-day blackout,/ which started on Friday.// (2) Traders should have earned more profit during long weekend.// (3) We cant close our shops on days like these despite the blackout.// (4) The statement was made by Association of Beringharjo Market Traders Yogyakarta chairman,/ Ujun Junaidi said Sunday as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.// (5) Ujun said that a textile shop could get Rp5 million (US$551) in revenue a day during normal long weekend.// (6) However,/ the blackout had cut the shop incomes to Rp1 million a day, he added.//-TJPThe text above has complete components of good paragraph (from topic sentence to coherence), complete schematic structure of news item (from headline to sources of news), chronological order (logical order), and appropriate choice of words or diction like profit - losses, normal long weekend - a three-day blackout, suffering losses had cut the shop incomes, revenue incomes, and 5 million rupiah 1 million rupiah. The information is given in detail. Furniture Industry's Turnover Down Following CAFTA

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(1) The turnover of the furniture industry in Jeruklegi subdistrict, Cilacap regency, Central Java, dropped to 50 pct since the implementation of the China-ASEAN Free Trade (CAFTA).// (2) In the last three months,/ the furniture market had been sluggish.// (3) The statement was made by the owner of a furniture factory "UD Perintis Jaya Furniture" Sumarno said in Jeruklegi, Cilacap, last Friday.// (4) He said,/ the sale of his furniture since CAFTA went into effect reached only Rp25 million to Rp30 million per month,/ whereas in the past the turnover could reach Rp50 million per month with the markets in Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, and Yogyakarta.// (5) Actually, he added, the market had been sluggish since the last six months.///-AntaraThe text above has complete components of good paragraph (from topic sentence to coherence), complete schematic structure of news item (from headline to sources of news), chronological order (logical order), and appropriate choice of words or diction like dropped sluggish, turnover sale market, 25 million rupiah 30 million rupiah 50 million rupiah dropped to 50 pct (50%), furniture industry furniture factory, and the last three months the last six months per month. The information is given in detail. The results of the whole texts (1 - 15) showed that only 60% of the texts fulfilled the requirements of the schematic structure of news item. From the aspect of coherence, only 40% of the texts are significantly coherent. From the aspect of cohesion, only 13.33 % of the texts are significantly cohesive. From the aspect of complete components of good paragraph, the whole texts are fully significant. And from the aspect of the logical order of paragraph, the whole texts are fully significant too. The complete results are showed in table 2 and table 3 as follows: Table 2: The Results of the Whole Texts in the Aspect of Schematic Structure of News Item No. 1. 2. 3. The Category of Text Complete Schematic Structure Texts Texts without background events Texts without sources of news Total Total 9 4 2 15 Percentages 60% 26.66% 13.33% 100%

Table 3: The Results of the Whole Texts in the Aspect of Coherence and Cohesion, Complete Components of Good Paragraph, and Logical Order No. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. The Series of Text Text 1 Text 2 Text 3 Text 4 Text 5 Text 6 Text 7 Text 8 Text 9 Text 10 Text 11 Text 12 Text 13 Text 14 Text 15 Coherence Less coherent Less coherent Less coherent Less coherent Less coherent Less coherent Less coherent Coherent Coherent Coherent Less coherent Coherent Less coherent Coherent Coherent Cohesion Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Less cohesive Cohesive Cohesive Complete Components of Good Paragraph and Logical Order Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant Fully significant

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CONCLUSIONS The coherence in the Written English News Texts of Programa II RRI Semarang is not fully significant. This is indicated by the fact that only 60 % of the texts fulfilled the requirements of the schematic structure of news item. From the aspect of logical order and good paragraph, the whole texts are fully significant. The cohesion in the Written English News Texts of Programa II RRI Semarang is not fully significant. This is indicated by only 13.33 % of the texts have the good and appropriate application of cohesive devices, especially for the aspect of reference, conjunction, and reiteration. The features of coherence and cohesion in the Written English News Texts in Programa II RRI Semarang are dominated by news item of economy, as the topic of economy presents more detailed information, significant coherence and cohesion, and good and appropriate choice of words or diction. Finally, it is suggested for researchers to have the results of the study as considerable materials for further researches by having more complex and complete English skills. And it is also suggested for news-draft writer/s to consider the aspect of coherence and cohesion in writing the news texts, as the aspect of coherence and cohesion of the texts helps the readers understand the texts. REFERENCES Baker, M. 1997. In Other Words A Course Book on Translation. London: Routledge. Brown, H D. 2001. Teaching By Principles and Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. New York: Addision Wesley Longman, Inc. ------------. 2003. Language Assessment Principles and Classroom Practices. San Francisco: San Francisco University. Eggins, S. 1994. An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Pinter Publishers Ltd. Ellis, R. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. London: Longman Group Limited. ------------. 1992. Language and Power. England: Longman Group Ltd. Gao, S. 2009. Policies for Teachers towards Errors in Collge English Writing. China: Qingdao University of Science and Technology. Vol. 2, No. 2, May 2009. Gerot, L., and P Wignell.1995. Making Sense of Functional Grammar An Introductory Workbook. Australia: Gerd Stabler. Goh, C C M and R E Silver.2004. Language Acquisition and Development - A Teachers Guide. Singapore: Pearson Education South Asia Pie Ltd. Halliday, M A K. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar Third Edition. London: Oxford University Press Inc. Hammond, J., et al. 1992. English for Social Purposes A Handbook for Teachers of Adult Literacy. Sydney NSW: Macquire University. Harmer, J. 2007. How to Teach English - An Introduction to the Practice of English Language Teaching. England: Pearson Education Limited. Hatim, B. 2001. Teaching and Researching Translation. England: Pearson Education Limited. Karra, M. 2009. Second Language Acquisition: Learners Errors and Error Correction in Language Teaching, United States 28/11/2009.

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