In the 2013 Curriculum, the eighth graders in the second semester are expected to produce/ create spoken and written recount text, but this blog will only put its concern on the written recount text, because learners can develop their writing competence through blogging. The basic competence that learners should achieve in the syllabus is creating a simple and short written recount text which tells about experience/ activity/ event by paying attention to its purpose, generic structure, and language feature, correctly and based on the context (KD 4.15.2).
Recount
text
Recount text is one of text types (genres) which retells someone’s experience in the past. Knapp (1992, p. 13) as cited in Knapp and Watkins (2005, p. 27) points out that recount is included into narrative (narrating) – a big (macro) genre that can easily accommodate one or more other genres and still remain dominant – in which it is the simplest text type of narrative that formally exhibits the sequence of events. Because recount and narrative are closely related, the grammatical features of recount and narrative are almost the same, but they are different in the generic structure. The further description of recount text is displayed as follows:
Recount text is one of text types (genres) which retells someone’s experience in the past. Knapp (1992, p. 13) as cited in Knapp and Watkins (2005, p. 27) points out that recount is included into narrative (narrating) – a big (macro) genre that can easily accommodate one or more other genres and still remain dominant – in which it is the simplest text type of narrative that formally exhibits the sequence of events. Because recount and narrative are closely related, the grammatical features of recount and narrative are almost the same, but they are different in the generic structure. The further description of recount text is displayed as follows:
The social functon of recount text:
Reporting, telling, and explaining. In learning to write a recount text, learners are expected to communicate states and events in the past,
in order to share the information with
others, explain why things happened, etc in a piece of written text (Indonesia, 2014, p. 158).
The linguistic elements of recount text:
- the verbs are in Simple Past Tense, Past Continuous Tense
- using conjunctions: when, while, after, before, etc.
- the use of singular and plural noun appropiately, with or without, a, the, this, those, my, their,etc
- spelling and punctuation
- handwriting
The generic structure of recount text is:
a. orientation
mentioning the people, place, time, etc that are included in the story/ event/ experience
b. explaining the sequence of events in chronological order, in sequence and coherently
c. closing (reorientation)
giving comment or general value of the event/ experience/ story that has been delivered (optional)
(Based on the syllabus of 2013 curriculum and teacher’s book When English rings the Bell)
The example of recount text:
(Knapp & Watkins, 2005, p. 234)
References:
Indonesia, Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan. 2014. Buku Guru Bahasa Inggris: When English Rings a Bell. Jakarta : Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 2014.
Indonesia, Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan. 2014. Buku Siswa Bahasa Inggris: When English Rings a Bell. Jakarta : Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 2014.
Knapp, Peter & Watkins, Megan . 2005. Genre, Text, Grammar. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
