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WRITING GENERIC STRUCTURE OF RECOUNT TEXT AT FIRST YEAR STUDENTS OF SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL 5 PADANG ACADEMIC YEAR
2014/2015
Oleh:
Mardiani Syafitri *)
**) Herfyna Asty dan **) Dona Alicia Staff Pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
ABSTRAK
Skripsi ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis menulis teks recount sesuai dengan struktur generik yang terdiri dari orientasi, urutan kejadian, and reorientasi. Jenis dari penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif. Partisipan dalam penelitian ini adalah kelas X Mia 1 SMAN 5 Padang akademik 2014/2015.
Peneliti memilih kelas X MIA 1 karena peneliti memilih satu kelas secara random yang terdiri dari 31 siswa sebagai partisipan. Sumber data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini berupa dokumen dari tugas siswa. Peneliti meminta data yang telah ada kepada guru Bahasa Inggris. Data dapat dikumpulkan peneliti pada hari Senin tanggal 8 Desember 2014. Setelah data terkumpul, kemudian peneliti menganalisis hasil latihan siswa berdasarkan indikator struktur generik dari teks recount yang telah ditentukan. Dari hasil penelitian ini, peneliti menemukan beberapa cara siswa dalam menulis struktur generik dari teks recount. Peneliti menemukan beberapa variasi cara siswa-siswa menulis teks recount, seperti dalam menulis orientasi, ada siswa yang hanya membuat tempat, ada siswa yang hanya membuat waktu, dan ada juga siswa yang tidak membuat keduanya. Dalam penulisan urutan kejadian, ada siswa yang tidak membuat urutan kejadian dan ada yang membuatnya. Kemudian, dalam penulisan reorientasi, ada siswa yang tidak membuat reorientasi dan ada juga yang membuatnya.
Secara general, siswa kelas X MIA 1 SMAN 5 Padang telah mampu menulis struktur generik dari teks recount dengan baik. Namun, juga terdapat beberapa siswa yang belum mampu menulis struktur generik teks recount dengan baik berdasarkan teori Barwick.
Key words: Recount Text, Writing and Generic Structure
*) Penulis
**) Pembimbing
2 INTRODUCTION
Writing is not easy for students. It is a way to express and to convey what one’s feeling and thinking into the paper. In educational field, writing helps students to improve their skill in making a sentence, produced a paragraph, and developed a good text. In writing, process is the important thing. Teacher can know how far the students are able to make a text and what the mistakes that are always done by the students.
Moreover, the students can understand how to write the sentence, paragraph, and a text. Good sentence consists of subject, verb, and object and it can be able to add complement. Group of sentence about single topic is called paragraph.
A text can be created through collections of paragraphs which consist of topic sentence or main ideas, supporting details, and conclusion.
Through the process of writing, students can know in what parts they make mistake, so they can create a good written form.
In writing, the students can search some ideas in their mind into some texts. One kind of text that can be learned by students is recount text. Recount text is a text which retells events or experiences in the past. Its purpose is either to inform or to entertain the audience. To practice the students’ writing, they can start to write the generic structure of this text first consists of orientation, series of events, and re-orientation.
By writing the generic structure, the students can develop their paragraph into good text. It is good for them to increase their ability in writing. If they have good ability in writing, they will be easy to arrange all kinds of texts.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE A. Writing
1. Definition of Writing
According to Oshima and Hogue (1991:3), writing is a process, not a product. Writing is a complicated skill to be achieved even by the professional one yet it cannot be acquired like skill in speaking. It has to be studied, developed and practiced more. To make a good writing, a writer must do several stages; they are started from prewriting, write the composition, revising, editing and publishing. Those stages cannot be done in short time and each stage will give important contribution to the next stages to encourage the content of writing. Often the writer stops on a stage and cannot continue the writing because the process of writing itself has to complete the previous stage. That is why the writing is considered as a process more than a product.
In contrary, Nunan (2003: 88) states that writing is both of process and product. The writer passes the several steps in composing his/
her writing. These steps as the process of writing will guide writer to make a piece of writing.
These steps are started by prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and publishing, in which the product of writing is finished. Furthermore, Nunan defines writing in some definitions; it is both a physical and mental act, its purpose is both to express and impress. As physical act, writing is an activity in which the writer express his/ her thought or ideas into the medium, for the example writer can write on the paper, type on the computer, on the other hand as a mental activity means that writing is a way the writer
3 find ideas and think about how he/she will develop it.
Based on explanations above, it can be concluded that, writing as a communicative skill and also the productive skill has several stages to be done. As a communicative skill, writing communicates the messages to the readers in the text form by using conventional marks to represent the messages which are conveyed in spoken language. As a productive skill, writer produces his writing to the audiences, the people who read the product. The product of writing is made based on several stages in order to deliver a good and clear composition.
2. Teaching Writing
Based on Curriculum of 2013, in English instruction, teaching writing at Senior High School is compulsory language skill of English which should be taught to the students. Teaching writing is included as one of productive skills besides speaking. As a productive skill, writing is one of compulsory English skills which have to be taught to the students at Senior High School.
Nunan (2003:92) mentions several principles for teaching writing. The first, teachers should understand students’ reason for writing. It shows that the teachers must give the chance for students to think about their reason of writing. The second is provided many opportunities of students to write. The third, teachers make helpful and meaningful feedback.
The fourth, teachers clarify their selves and their students about how their writing the teachers will be evaluated.
Additionally, Mary (2011:27) said that when teach writing they need to focus on both
accuracy on building up and communicating a message. The most effective learning of writing skills is likely to take place when students are writing real message for real audience, or at least when they are performing tasks which they are likely to have to do in their out of class.
Finally, teaching writing is needed to help students to make good writing. To get good writing, teachers should give exercises and explanations to students about basic convention of writing. In the process of teaching writing, teacher no longer merely concern with the next produced by the students but also how this text has been product to be a good text.
B. Recount Text
1. Definition of Recount Text
Recount tells a series of events and evaluates their significance in some way. It is also to give audience a descriptions of what occurred and when it occurred. The story recount has expressions of attitude and feeling, usually made by narrator about the events.
Barwick (2000:8) argues that recount recalls and reconstructs events, experiences and achievements from the past in a logical sequence. Some recounts will be purely informative, while others will aim to both inform and entertain. Even though a text follows a basic structure, the relationship between the text and the reader, the subject matter and whether the text is spoken or written affects the language that is used.
Strong and Corbett (2011:49) define that recount text is one of the easier non-fiction text types, since it focuses on telling what happened.
Recount text should be a retelling of events that
4 have actually happened: in the first person if it is personal recount, and in the third person if recount events have happened to others.
Effective recount relies on the ability of the writer to relate events in an interesting manner that engages the reader.
Recount text is as a piece of writing which tells us what happened, shows about what the activities in the past. Minner and Zitnay (2012:2) explain that a recount text tells about a specific person or event. It is organized as a series through time. Recounts contain a series of events that pertain to the person or event that the text focuses on. Recounts may present a topic through a series of time.
From the idea above, the researcher concludes that recount text is a text to retell an experience in the past in which the events should be in order. Beside, the purpose of recount text is to inform and entertain the reader. In addition, it is also to document and describe the events in a sequence when they happened.
2. Generic Structure of Recount Text A recount text usually has main parts of generic structure. According to Anderson (1999:5), the generic structure of recount text focuses on a sequence of events and follows three stages. The first is orientation. The orientation supplies the background information needed to fully understand the retelling. It establishes the time, setting and who or what is participating. The audience needs to know when the events occurred, who was involved, what happened, where the activity or event took place and sometimes what the reason was for the event. The second is sequence of events. In this
part of the recount, it is important that students are given adequate guidelines and scaffolds to assist with the structure of writing. Students should focus on detailing who, what, where and when. The third is re-orientation. This often rounds off the series of events. At this stage, students are experimenting with different structures of recount; the re-orientation can be used as an introductory paragraph.
Barwick (2000:9) states that recounts generally follow a similar generic structure, they are:
a. Orientation. Orientation, provides all the necessary background information to enable the reader to make sense of the text, it includes time, place and situation (who, when, where, why information).
b. Series of events. Events should be selected carefully to add the readers’
understanding of the topic.
c. Re-orientation. This final section concludes the recount by summarizing outcomes or results, evaluating the topics’
importance or offering personal comments or opinion.
Related to the explanation above, the researcher concludes that recount text has some generic structures. The first is orientation. It is introduction of the story that contains participants, place, and time. The second is series of events. It is the steps that tell about the sequence of events that happened in the story.
The last is re-orientation. It is the step that tells the ending of the story to summarize the whole story.
5 RESEARCH METHOD
The design of this research was descriptive design. According to Gay and Airasian (2000:275), descriptive research determines and describes the way things are. It shows that descriptive research describes the things or issues by using some explanation opinions or descriptions directly to the issues that is being studied. The researcher used descriptive design because she wanted to describe and analyze about the students organize the generic structure of recount text at tenth grade of Senior High School 5 Padang. After describing, the researcher wanted analyzes the students organize the generic structure of recount text. So, the researchers gave the analysis accurately.
This research was conducted on Senior High School in Padang SMA N 5 Padang. According to Gay and Airasian (2000:281), selected research participant can be able to provide the desired information sought and willing to provide it to the researcher. The participant of this research is the students of grade X MIA 1 in academic years 2014/2015. Researcher chose at class X MIA 1 because researcher chose 1 class as participant in this research.
Document is one of sources of data to collect the data and information that the researcher need from the participant. McMillan Schumacher (2001:451) states that artifacts of present-day groups and educational institutions may take four forms: personal documents, official documents, objects, and erosion measures. The document that was used in this research is students’ writing tasks which include personal document. Personal documents are any
first-person narrative that describes individuals’
actions, experiences, and beliefs.
After collecting the data, the next step was analyzing the data in order to find out the ability of the students in writing recount text. In this research, the researcher used method of data analysis. The researcher analyzes the data by using theory Gay and Airasian. In analyzing the data, there were: reading or memoing, describing, classifying, interpreting, and representing as suggested by Gay and Airasian (2000:239).
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Generic structure reflects how the text elements in the recount text are organized. The analysis shows that the thirty one recount texts similar generic structure in the way of how the text elements were organized, namely:
orientation, events, and re-orientation. There are seven recount texts did not include orientation which present about some information such as who, when, where, and why. And then, there are fifteen recount texts did not include re- orientation which presents optimal-closure events.
After the researcher analyzed writing generic structure of recount text, the researcher has answered the research questions. The research question was “how do the students organize the generic structure of recount text?”
the answer was there were some students’ ways in organization the generic structure of recount text. The researcher found some students’ ways how the students wrote orientation, events, and re-orientation in writing generic structure of recount text. Here some students’ way in writing
6 generic structure of recount text, the research found some variations:
1. Orientation
a. Focused on 1 participants b. Focused on 2 participants c. Focused on 3 participants 2. Events
a. There is events b. There is no events 3. Re-orientation
a. There is re-orientation b. There is no re-orientation Based on analyzing above, the researcher could conclude the organization of students’
writing generic structure of recount text was good. Most of the students were able to write generic structure of recount text well based on Barwick’s theory. However, there were some of the students also did not fulfill some criteria in writing generic structure of recount text, it also was call generic structure eventhough did not fulfill some criteria based on Barwick’s theory.
CONCLUSION
The researcher concludes that most of the students were not able to write the generic structure of recount well. It was supported by the fact that there were 7 students, who still got confused in writing orientation of recount text, 2 students who still got confused in writing events of recount text, and 15 students who still got confused in writing re-orientation of recount text.
Then, most of the students were able to write the generic structure of recount text well.
In short, based on the explanation above, the researcher can conclude some of the students of Senior High School 5 Padang at tenth grade were able to write generic structure of recount text well.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Greg. 1999. Targeting Text. Sidney: Blake Education.
Barwick, John. 2000. Targeting Text. Sidney: Blake Education
Gay, LR and Airasian Peter. 2000. Educational Research: Competencies for Analysis and application,6th ed. New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, Inc.
Mary, Spratt, et. All. 2011. The TKT Teaching Knowledge Test Course, Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press.
Minner, Darla and Zitnay, Jill. 2012. Exploring Nonfiction With Young Learners.
Thronburry Road: Published by Rowman &
Littlefield Education.
Nunan, David. 2003. Practical English Language Teaching. McGraw-Hill: Harper Collins Publisher.
Oshima, Alice and Ann Hogue. 1991. Writing Academic English; 2 end . Chicago: Addison
Wesley Publishing Company.
