Kindergarten+Students+have+a+Basic+Understanding+of+Nonfiction

In a study by Duke (1998) results yielded in terms of the importance of teaching informational text to young kindergarten students. In this particular study, 20 preliterate kindergartners were tested on their knowledge of fiction and nonfiction texts in September and then again in December. Students were asked to use “pretend reading” to tell what they thought the book was saying in a fiction and nonfiction text. During the course of the three month span between testing, students were exposed to informational books by the classroom teacher. On average 3-4 books were read per week and during the length of the study a total of about 25 informational books were read to the students (Duke, 1998). The inclusion of reading these texts helped students develop their nonfiction book knowledge.

In Duke’s (1998) study, students had some concepts of informational book knowledge in September. However Duke (1998) found that, “December readings contained many more usages of information book features and among more children” (Duke, 1998, p. 306). Duke (1998) discovered that “these young children produced proportionately more timeless verb constructions, more generic noun constructions, more repetition of the topical theme, more characteristic information book openings, more classificatory structures, and more comparative/contrastive structures” (Duke, 1998, p. 306). One of the specific areas in which there was an increase was in terms of the verb constructions of informational texts. Rather than students stating what happened in the past or what is happening in the present, they were more clearly stating what happens generally speaking, which is the typical verb construction of a nonfiction text (Duke, 1998). “While on average 16.68% of children’s total verbs were in a timeless constructions in September; in December, 35.98% of their verbs were timeless” (Duke, 1998, p. 309). This is an important growth to note in terms of demonstrating student understanding of nonfiction text structure.