Definition of Recount Texts The Structure of Recount Texts

28 students were having good cooperation due to the research process. Although some male students were sometimes made little noise, it seems to be normal because they are teenage students.

E. Recount Text

1. Definition of Recount Texts

Recount texts are considered as the most common kind of texts found in everyday life. People can easily learn and understand the concept of this text since it tells about personal experience. Normally, people can retell what they have ever experienced because they did that in the past and automatically memorized the feeling and the events. Usually recount texts can be found in any story books and non-fiction books like newspaper reports, television interviews, and eyewitness accounts Anderson and Anderson, 1997: 49. Anderson and Anderson 1997: 48 suggest that a recount is a piece of text that retells past events usually in the order in which they happened. The purpose of a recount text is to give the audience about what happened in the past and when it happened. In addition, Emilia 2011: 74 states that recount is a text used to retell past events. Recount texts are commonly written based on real personal experience, otherwise, there are also some recount texts that are written based on imagination or beyond the writer‟s experience. Recount texts can function to inform and to tell personal experience happened in the past in a sequence of events. It is well known that telling 29 someone a real story is common in our environment both in spoken and in written forms. If the students also feel free to share their stories in oral form, it is possible for them to deliver it in the written form.

2. The Structure of Recount Texts

In writing recount texts, there are some important points which need to be highlighted. According to Anderson‟s theory 1997: 53, a recount text has three main parts generic structure as seen follows. a. Orientation It is the first paragraph, the opening of the text which consists of introduction of the topic. It gives background information about who, what, where, and when. b. Events A series of paragraphs are to tell the events when they happened in the sequence order. c. Re-orientation It functions as the closing statement of the whole story. It may include personal comments but this part is not always necessary. Instead of the generic structure, the recount texts also have some language features that are worth knowing. They are explained as follows. a. The use of proper nouns. Proper nouns are used in recount texts to show whoever involved in the text. 30 b. The use of simple past tense. It uses simple past tense because it tells about events happened in the past. c. The use of descriptive words. The descriptive words are to give details of the story about who, what, when, where and how. d. The words to show the order of events. To write the story in chronological order, it uses time connectors. It is used to signal the movement of one event to another. The example of time connectors used in recount texts are first, next, then, after.

3. How to Teach Recount Texts