Stavros 'Personal Recount In My Animal Tale'

Stavros, a student who studies English as a Second Language (ESL), wrote a short text about his experiences with his cousin’s dog named Suzie. The genre of the text is a personal recount which he has titled ‘My Animal Tale’. A personal recount is a description of an event in which the author is personally involved in. In this case, the student retells his past experiences with his cousins’ dog named Suzie. The text does not seem to be a personal recount in the form of an autobiography or diary entry which are other types of personal recounts, instead, it is more-so a narrative to entertain the reader.

Stavros conveyed his ideas/ideational meanings throughout his text quite well. He did this by incorporating many participants in which he acknowledged

Some non-human participants included Suzie the dog, his cousins’ house, the park, the hole that Suzie dug, the soccer pitch and soccer game. The student also used a variety of processes (also known verbs/doing words). Stavros clearly informed readers of the actions that were carried out during the student’s experiences by using simple action processes such as ‘bought’, ‘walking’, ‘ran’, ‘dug up’, ‘kicking’, and ‘walked’; mental processes such as ‘forgot’, ‘thought’, ‘notice’, ‘knew’ and ‘didn’t know’; relational processes such as ‘had’ and ‘was’ and a saying process which was ‘talking’. Circumstances is the additional information that tells us about the time, place, manner, cause/reason and accompaniment around the event. Stavros demonstrated proper use of language to present the time of which things occurred through

Stavros opened his text with a topic sentence: ‘My cousin had a dog a few years ago her name was Suzie.’ This gives readers a general scope of the theme and also structure of the text. Additionally, the information in this sentence informs the readers that he is writing about previous experiences (‘had’ – past tense and a few years ago). Stavros strongly portrayed theme by referring to Suzie in majority of his sentences. However, in paragraphs 4 and 5 the emphasis on Suzie becomes less prominent and shifts towards the hole that Suzie had dug. The hole that Suzie dug would come under the rheme which is the additional/remainder of information around the theme (Suzie). Another technique that Stavros used to convey textual meanings was through the use of lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion are the word associations we make, used to avoid repetition and can also be used to extend ideas. For example, Stavros used ‘she’ throughout the text to refer back to the dog named Suzie who was previously introduced in the first sentence. Other reference items included ‘his’, ‘we’, ‘her’ and ‘it’. These reference items which Stavros included in his personal recount, are a great way to maintain cohesion, whilst keeping the reader engaged. He also uses connectives which are used to clarify, show time, add information, show cause, sequence ideas and condition. Some examples of connectives used in