ABSTRACT
The best texts labelled as ‘recount’ or ‘instruction’ are enormously varied and show signs of the author’s genuine concern about how children read, think and learn. The ‘recount’ stable takes in a range of texts including accounts of events in the real world, diary and logbook writing and two more ‘literary’ forms, autobiography and biography. This chapter describes the terminology used in statutory and guidance documents, and refer to two chronological texts types, ‘recount’ and ‘instruction’. Teachers know that children respond readily to chronological texts; after all we plan and live our lives in a time sequence, think and even dream in this way. The power of the chronological and the narrative as a way of relating to and organizing our world is explored in a well-known essay by Barbara Hardy entitled ‘Narrative as a Primary Act of Mind’. Chronological non-fiction texts are often divided into two main categories.
