Genre Development and Learning: Children Writing Stories, Science Reports, and Poems

In this study I explore children’s working knowledge of narrative, scientific, and poetic genres. Fifty-four kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade children composed original texts representing each of these genres. They also provided oral justifications for why each of their texts instantiated the designated genre. All texts were coded for the presence or absence of a variety of textural and structural features that are typically distributed differentially across the three focal genres. Analyses showed that participants had significantly more experience with narrative genres than either scientific or poetic genres and that they possessed significantly more working knowledge of narrative genres than the other focal genres. Additionally, participants possessed more knowledge of macro-level genre features such as text structure than microlevel features such as cohesion markers. The findings suggest that children develop increasingly differentiated and flexible repertoires of genre forms and functions. Comparing findings from this study with findings from other studies suggests that tasks and task contexts significantly influence how and to what extent children demonstrate their genre knowledge, that different tasks scaffold genre learning in different ways and to different degrees, and that children’s imbalanced exposure to different genres may contribute to their differential knowledge of genres. The study contributes to theorizing genre learning as a complex, contingent, and emergent process of differentiation and integration.