PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Appropriate use of cohesive devices is vital in determining the quality of a writing product. The present study is aimed to find possible differences between male and female students in employing cohesive devices in writing as a tool to maintain coherence in the composition they made and the students’ familiarity to the cohesive devices mentioned in Halliday and Hasan’s Conjunction Device Taxonomy. Data were collected from 145 essays produced by the freshmen of Indonesian university students and students’ responses to Likert scale questionnaires. The findings show the varieties of cohesive devices and the students’ familiarity to them. It was identified that there were only limited numbers of cohesive devices that were used by the students and they were familiar with. In addition, the statistical analysis figured out that gender did not show significant difference in the use of the cohesive devices and the students’ familiarity to them. Based on the limitations of the present study, recommendations are offered at the end of the paper.