GOLDEN LOVE SONG 60 to 70 VOLUME 1

How to Teach a Text

1. RECOUNT

General Features

Social Purpose

Recounts ‘tell what happened’. The purpose of a factual recount is to document a series of events and evaluate their significance in some way. The purpose of the literary or story recount is to tell a sequence of events so that it entertains. The story recount has expressions of attitude and feeling, usually made by the narrator about the events.

Structure

Recounts are organised to include:

✒ an orientation providing information about ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘when’;

✒ a record of events usually recounted in chronological order;

✒ personal comments and/or evaluative remarks that are interspersed throughout the record of events;

 ✒ reorientation that ‘rounds off’ the sequence of events.

Grammar

Common grammatical patterns of a recount include:

✒ use of nouns and pronouns to identify people, animals or things involved;

 ✒ use of action verbs to refer to events;

✒ use of past tense to locate events in relation to speaker’s or writer’s time;

✒ use of conjunctions and time connectives to sequence the events;

✒ use of adverbs and adverbial phrases to indicate place and time;

✒ use of adjectives to describe nouns

Teaching Notes: Stage 1

Students’ personal experiences and class experiences, such as shared reading of picture book recounts, provide ideal content for students’ recounts. Students can give oral recounts of personal experience and jointly construct retellings of shared picture book recounts. Many teachers in Early Stage 1 use news telling as a context for oral recounts. It is important to scaffold children’s language use to ensure there is a sequence of events in their recounts