Lexical Cohesion in the Narrative Produced by Javanese School-Age Children in Pati

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents a study which discussed the narrations in Bahasa Indonesia by children in Pati, Central Java, who still use Javanese at home. Our focus is on lexical cohesive devices, based on Halliday and Hasan’s (Cohesion in English. Longman, 1976) theory. The participants in this study are school-age children (N = 51) aged 6–9 years old, classified into three groups based on their grades at school. This study uses semi-structured elicitation technique with silent film The Pear Story (developed by Chafe in The pear film, 1975) as the main instrument. Instruction is in Indonesian. The analysis is supported by our observation at school and parental questionnaires on language use. Descriptive statistics analysis is conducted to observe the tendency of the use of the lexical cohesive device. It is found that children use Indonesian- and Javanese cohesive devices in their story and use code-mixing, as well. The result shows that the use of repetition cohesive device in Indonesian is being very dominant, compared to other cohesive devices. The most dominant ones in all grades are the repetitions of nouns and verbs.