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classrooms. And at the same time, the teacher can use retellingas a way to assess how well students comprehend a story, and then use this information to help studentsdevelop a deeper understanding of what they have read.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

This chapter starts with an overview of text-retelling, which includes definition, classification,functions of the retelling, and a distinction between recitation and retelling. Meanwhile, the researcherreviews some related studies on retelling both abroad and at home. Besides, the relationships betweenretelling and recitation and related studies of retelling in writing are described in detail. Finally, theresearcher gives a summary.

2.1 An overview of Retelling
There are a variety of definitions of retelling made by many researchers at home and abroad. Thereare some of them listed as follows.A retelling is students are asked to tell everything he or she can about story or text after they listen tothe tape or their teacher read ( Kluth, 2005).Brown & Cambourne (1987) defined especially the written retelling as “a holistic way to test theability of children to actively reconstruct stories they have read”.Wright (1995) puts forward that retelling as a language learning strategy. He said that retellingstrategy provides a good opportunity for learners devoting themselves to learning activities, which can beachieved by various forms of oral language. Of course, it requires the learners are very familiar with thecontent of the story.Dr. Gudwin presented a report about implementing retelling strategy at 2002 EERA AnnualConference. He stated that retelling involves thinking, interacting, comparing, matching, selecting,speaking, listening, reading, writing and organizing information, remembering, comprehending, illustrating,higher-order thinking, sharing, vocabulary, predictions, sequencing, recall, connection to priorknowledge-natural form of language behavior.In Emily Kissner’s opinion, retelling is an important skill for readers of all levels, which is beneficialfor students from preschool to college and beyond. He stated specifically that summarizing, paraphrasingand retelling are skills for better reading, writing and test taking (Kissner, 2005).
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2.2 Previous Studies of Retelling
As an effective method to improve students’ reading and writing ability, the related studies ofretelling were started in the works of Cambourne and Brown, in which the two people mentioned theimportance of the natural learning and the entire language awareness in the context. Retelling can helpstudents have an overall understanding of the text, and grasp the theme of the text. For students, retelling isthe recalling of a series of events described in the text and it is frequently regarded as an effectivetechnique to test learners’ comprehension of the text they have learned in school (Brown & Cambourne,1987; Gambrell, Pfeiffer, & Wilson, 1985; Irwin & Mitchell, 1983).Retelling helps students to construct awareness of story content, and can be used to evaluate students’comprehension (Morrow, 1985). Retelling is an integrated learning strategy which is a combination ofreading text, understanding and analysis. Recently, more and more scholars have begun to use the methodof retelling to improve students’ reading level and provide more structured retelling techniques to Englishlearners (Hansen,