An Assessment of Cohesion and Coherence in Students’ Descriptive and Narrative Essays: The Case of Sodo Preparatory School Grade Eleven Students’

This study is aimed to assess the students’ use of cohesion and coherence in their descriptive and narrative essays. It was conducted at Sodo Preparatory School on grade 11 students. The descriptive research design was employed to achieve the intended aim of the study. In this study, 30 grade eleven students were selected as participants through simple random sampling technique. Document analysis was used to collect data from the sample students. The data collected through document analysis was analyzed qualitatively based on the analysis parameters of cohesive devices; such as, substitution ellipsis, reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion to determine meaningfully (coherently) written students’ essays. The findings revealed that students’ used a variety of cohesive devices in each genre of writing except ellipsis and they employed all the other sub categories of cohesive devices in their (descriptive and narrative) essays. However, among the frequently used cohesive devices, the largest numbers of connectors were inappropriately instanced regarding the total use of devices. The students’ inappropriate use of cohesive devices mainly appeared with conjunction, followed by reference, lexical cohesion, and substitution signals. As a result, the essays lacked consistent key expressions, clear purpose of the statement, and the logical shift from one sentence to the other. Based these findings, conclusions and recommendations were made.