Purpose of Recount Text

According to Burden and Byrd in Ermayanti‟s journal, there are two factors that influence students‟ reading comprehension and they are related one another, they are: internal factors and external factors. The first is internal factors personal factors, it means that the factors which come from the reader himself or herself. This factor deals with self-motivation and interest. Motivation plays an important role in comprehending the text. The students will be motivated to read when they feel that they need something from the text. The motivation can be intrinsic to increasee the reader‟s competences and extrinsic to get a reward. 32 Besides motivation, interest also becomes one of the important factors in order to increase the students‟ comprehension in reading. If someone has interest to read, it means that he or she will get a good result. On the other side, if the reader has no interest to read it will make reading without comprehension. The second is external factors. The external factors have a close relationship to reading material and reading teacher. Both of these factors are related to each other. Recount is a text which list and describe past experiences by retelling events in the order in which they happened chronological order. The purpose of the Recounts text 32 Nanda Ermayanti, Journal of English Language Teaching , Achievement in Reading Comprehension , Medan: ELT Forum 2013 , p.1. is to retell events with the purpose of either informing or entertaining their audience or both. 33 Based on the language assessment theory of Brown, there are some criteria are commonly used in measuring students ‟ reading comprehension, they are : 1 Main Idea topic 2 Inference implied details 3 Grammatical features references 4 Detail scanning for specifically stated detail 5 Excluding facts not written 6 Supporting idea 7 Vocabulary in context. 34 Based on the explanations above, the writer used some criteria to asses the reading comprehension on recount text based on the language assessment theory of Brown such as ; the main idea of the text, inference implied detail, grammatical features, detail scanning for a specifically stated detail, excluding fact not written, supporting idea and vocabulary of the text. 33 Eni Yusnita, Improving Students’ Recount text Writing by Using Picture Series, Pontianak: The Journal, 2011 , p. 3. 34 H. Douglas Brown, Op. Cit, p. 206.