An Analysis of the English Textbooks Entitled Pathway to English For Senior High School Grades X AND XI

Abstract

The objectives of this research are 1) to identify the types of cohesion in the narrative texts used in the textbooks entitled Pathway to English for senior high school grades X and XI, and 2) to reveal the readability of the narrative texts as language inputs seen from types of cohesion in narrative texts used in the textbooks entitled Pathway to English for senior high school grades X and XI.This study applied the quantitative and qualitative method. The objects of this study were 13 narrative texts in the textbooks. The data were in the form of sentences and analyzed using the theory of cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The research stages were designing the research, collecting the data, interpreting the data, and analyzing the research findings. The data validation was done by the thesis supervisor and students of linguistics. The findings showed that grammatical cohesion outnumbered lexical cohesion. There were 973 occurrences of grammatical cohesion or 60.61% from the total occurrences. Meanwhile, lexical cohesion only occurred 632 times or 39.38%. Based on the categorization of cohesion by Hoey (1991), the texts containing dense grammatical cohesion are considered to be low cohesion thus it can be categorized unreadable as language inputs. As many as 12 narrative texts in this research were not readable and needed treatments to ease reading comprehension of senior high school students. This research suggested that the material developers should consider the aspect of cohesion in writing and selecting the materials and teacher should give more explanation on the relation among the elements of the texts.