IMPROVING STUDENTS’ WRITING ABILITY BY TEACHING GRAMMATICAL COHESIVE DEVICES AT THE THIRD-SEMESTER STUDENTS OF STKIP YPUP MAKASSAR

Abstract

This research aimed to find out whether the use of grammatical cohesive devices improve the students’ writing skill at the third semester students of English Department STKIP YPUP Makassar. This research used pre-experimental method. The data were collected quantitatively by applying statistical analysis. The result showed that pre-test mean score was lower than post-test mean score (54.4<78.8.). It means that grammatical cohesive devices can improve the students’ writing skills significantly. It was also showed by the score of t- test value was greater than t-table (11.04>2.145).This research concluded that grammatical cohesive devices can improve the students’ writing skill which was showed by the result of pretest and posttest based on  five component criteria in writing. From the posttest it showed that the students explore their idea relevant with the topic, the idea from their writing was showed clearly. in other hands, the students used the effective words with a correct grammatical, punctuation and also capitalization.