Every college students have to be able to write scientific text. They also have to publish them. One of them is journal article. Journal article is scientific written text that is very essential for college students as their reference to be read. But the fact, the publication of journal article of Muria Kudus University students is still low. Perhaps it is because they do not understand yet the concept of cohesion to write text. Cohesion offers the continuity between parts of the text. The continuity can unite the meaning of the text and every text must have cohesion. It can be identified by exploring cohesive devices used in the text.
The aim of this study was to find out the types of cohesive devices used in the Linguistics journal and TEFLIN journal and to interpret the percentages of cohesive devices used in both journals.
This study uses a descriptive qualitative research design. Data in this study is the types of cohesive devices and the data source is clauses in the Linguistics journal and TEFLIN journal. The writer analyzed 5 articles from each journal and the data was identified by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) model while the percentages were determined by Ali formula.
The finding reveals that all types of cohesive devices used to construct the cohesion in the Linguistics journal and TEFLIN journal. In Linguistics journal the percentages of reference is 15,14%, substitution is 0,53%, ellipsis is 1,76%, conjunction is 11,62%, repetition is 45,07%, synonymy is 5,81%, hyponymy is 7,92%, meronymy is 2,11%, and collocation is 10,04% and in TEFLIN journal the percentages of reference is 22,76%, substitution is 0,61%, ellipsis is 0,76%, conjunction is 9,25%, repetition is 49,01%, synonymy is 3,34%, hyponymy is 2,88%, meronymy is 1,37%, and collocation is 10,02%. Finally the writer concludes the dominant lexical cohesive device is repetition and the dominant grammatical cohesive device is reference.
Based on the results, the writer suggests to the college students to improve their understanding of concept of cohesion and use various cohesive devices without being worrying in writing more especially in writing journal article. For lecturers, they should teach cohesion. It is to give consideration to the students how cohesion work and develop the scientific text. The understanding of cohesion can improve the quality of their writing more especially in writing journal article.