Lexical and Grammatical Cohesions in the Students’ Essay Writing as the English Productive skills

For the purpose of achieving a good essay writing, the students need to have capability to use the lexical and grammatical cohesions. This research aimed to describe the lexical and grammatical cohesions used by the students in writing essays at Makassar Muhammadiyah University. The research samples consisted of 91 students’ esssays from the English Education Department of FKIP Unismuh Makassar. The research used a writing test as an instrument to collect data. To achieve the aim of the research, a mixed method was used to describe the results of data analysis quatitatively and qualitatively. The results of the research revealed the use of lexical cohesion which included the use of repetition, synonym, hyponym, antonym, meronym, general noun, and collocation. From the seven kinds of lexical cohesion used by the students in writing essays, the general noun was mostly used by the students. Futhermore, grammatical cohesion revealed the use of reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Among them, the reference as a cohesion mark was mostly used by the students. The implication of the research results might be used significantly as the base for developing learning materials in teaching writing as one of the English productive skills.