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 h undred twenty-two informational texts and 222 story texts were collected fr om 2 classes of each grade level, K-5, in a suburban, middle- to upper-midd le-class school in a large district. These texts were analyzed for sophisti cation in macro-level organization including global elements, grammars of s tory and information genres (e.g., setting, initiating event, etc. for stor y, and topic orientation, characteristic attributes, etc. for information), and global structures (e.g., visual diagrams of content relationships). Fi ndings indicate that even the youngest children differentiated between the genres with over half of all kindergartners and first graders producing tex ts classified at some level of organizational complexity above labels and s tatements. By second grade all but a few children did so. The youngest writ ers' readings of their productions of labels, genre-specific statements, an d more complex information and story texts provide insights into the beginn ings of written genre knowledge development for this suburban group of chil dren. Texts produced across the grades offer additional insights into child ren's developing control of story and informational writing. The intermedia te forms are considered as a possible framework of story and informational writing development for children in this particular mainstream context.