1. RECOUNT
General Features
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
