itself can be in a form of both spoken and written. In line with Gerot and Wignell 1994:17 said that a genre can be defined as a culturally specific text-type which
result from using language written and spoken to help accomplish something. There are two kinds of genre; story genre and factual genre. Story genre is
deal with how text giving some entertaining and imaginative information. It consists of narrative, news story, exemplum, anecdote, spoof, and recount. Factual genre, on
the other hand, is deal with some factual information. It consists of procedure, explanation, report, exposition, discussion, description, review, news item, and
commentary.
2.3.1 Recount
From those kinds of genre, I will discuss recount as it is one of genre that being taught in almost every grade of junior and senior high school curriculum, and as
text-type which is used in this research.
2.3.1.1 Definition of Recount
Recount is a form of text which has social function to retell events for the purpose of informing or entertaining. Derewianka 1990:14 said that a recount is the unfolding
of sequence of events over time. The events are arranged based on the temporal sequence. It retells the past experience of someone as in accounts of science
excursion, vacation, or everyday life in another time and culture. 2.3.1.2
Social Function
According to Gerrot and Wignell 1994:194 the social function of a recount text is to retell the events for the purpose of informing, or entertaining the readers. To
achieve its purpose, the text will move through a different set of stages. 2.3.1.3
Generic Structure Gerrot and Wignell explain that the generic structure of recount generally begins
with orientation that provides the reader or the listener the background knowledge of the information involved in the text i.e. who was involved, where and when it
happened. The next stage is the series of events that being the focus of recount. It contains information about what happened in what sequence an event occurs. At
various states there maybe some personal comment on the incident e.g. We had a wonderful journey. As the end, there is a re-orientation that concludes optional-
closure of events. 2.3.1.4
Significant Lexico-grammatical Features Recount focuses on specific participants for example: I, Mr. Matt, the Robber. It
uses past tense since the event had already existed in the past She went, I saw, he said. The use of past tense is aimed to keep the past alive and the use of action verbs
e.g. climbed, ate, went to help interpreting the experience in the past. To show the circumstances of time and place e.g. on holiday, then, finally, next, before, in
recount text, linking items are used. To focus on temporal sequence, details irrelevant to the purpose of the text should be avoided.
2.3.1.5 Types of Recount
According to Derewianka 1990:15 there are three types of recount. They are the personal recount, factual recount and imaginative recount. The difference from those
three types is just on the content of information. Personal recount retells the writer‟s or the speaker‟s activity that he or she had personally involved in e.g. Oral
anecdote, diary entry, and fieldtrip journal. It uses first personal pronoun I, We. The personal feeling, comment, or response can be included particularly at the end
as the closure. The content is merely about the personal experience. On the other hand, the content of factual recount is merely about recording the particulars of an
incident e.g. report of a science experiment, police report, news report, historical account. Whereas an imaginative recount takes on imaginary role and giving details
of event e.g. a day in the life of a Roman slaves; how I invented…… 2.3.1.6
Example of Recount Here, I provide an example of recount text which had been evaluated in terms of
content and the realization of elements that construct the text, such as the lexico- grammatical features. The text was taken from Evaluating Text for a Model by
Rukmini 2010: 12.
Visiting Bali Orientation:
There were so many places in Bali that my friends Tomo decided to spend his
holiday in Bali to see as much as possible. Events:
He stayed in Kuta on arrival. He spent the first three days there swimming
and surving at Kuta beach.
On the fourth day he and his group drove on through mountains of Singaraja.
It is a city of about 90 thousand people, a busy but quite town. Its streets are lined with trees and old Dutch houses.
The next day they enjoyed Ubud. It was not to see the scenery but to see the art and the craft of the island. The first stop was at Batubulan, a centre of stone
sculpture. There, my friend watched young boy carving big blocks of stone. The next stop was Celuk, a center for silversmiths and goldensmiths. After that, he stopped a
little while for lunch in Sokawati. Tomo spent most of his time in Bali at beach. He
went sailing or surfboarding. Reorientation:
He was quite satisfied. Lexico-grammatical feature
focus on specific participants use of material process or action verbs
circumstances of time and place
focus on temporal sequence
use of past tense
2.4 General Concept of Writing
