AN ANALYSIS OF THE STUDENTS’ RECOUNT TEXTS

The purpose of the study is to analyze students’ ability in writing a recount text by investigating the generic structure and the linguistic features of recount text. This study is descriptive qualitative study. The data was six pieces of recount texts written by tenth grade students of high school. The data then was analyzed by using Transitivity system of Systemic Functional Linguistics developed by Halliday (1994) to identify the linguistic features of the text. Meanwhile, the generic structure of recount text is adopted from Anderson & Anderson (2003) and Emilia (2010) which was used to identify the generic structure of the students’ recount texts. The findings show that five students applied the generic structure of recount text in their writings, whereas one of whom missed the re-orientation part in hi writing. In regard to the text organization, five students put the structures in different paragraphs; however there is one student who wrote the story in only one paragraph. In regard to the linguistic features, most students likely found problems in applying regular and irregular verb form of simple past tense, the use of present tense, subject-verb agreement, gerund, to-infinitive, word choice, derivative form, conjunctions, prepositions, and articles. Therefore, it is recommended for the students to practice more in English grammar to improve their knowledge.