Children’s Development and Control of Written Story and Informational Genres: Insights from One Elementary School

The purpose of this study is to describe the intermediate forms of children’s informational and story compositions across the elementary grades. Two hundred twenty-two informational texts and 222 story texts were collected from 2 classes of each grade level, K–5, in a suburban, middle- to upper-middle-class school in a large district. These texts were analyzed for sophistication in macro-level organization including global elements, grammars of story and information genres (e.g., setting, initiating event, etc. for story, and topic orientation, characteristic attributes, etc. for information), and global structures (e.g., visual diagrams of content relationships). Findings indicate that even the youngest children differentiated between the genres with over half of all kindergartners and first graders producing texts classified at some level of organizational complexity above labels and statements. By second grade all but a few children did so. The youngest writers’ readings of their productions of labels, genre-specific statements, and more complex information and story texts provide insights into the beginnings of written genre knowledge development for this suburban group of children. Texts produced across the grades offer additional insights into children’s developing control of story and informational writing. The intermediate forms are considered as a possible framework of story and informational writing development for children in this particular mainstream context.