Primary+Students+can+differentiate+between+genres

In order to understand how important it is to teach nonfiction writing at the primary grade levels it is important to first understand that students at this age do in fact have an understanding of genre and can differentiate between various genres, such as story and informational text. Donovan (2001) did a study on students in a K-5 suburban school with a predominantly upper-class student population. Data for this study was collected by having each grade level class write a fictional story and an informational text by giving a short prompt. For the story prompt Donavan asked students to make up a story about anything they wanted and then write it for teachers and students to read. For the information prompt, she had students think of topics that they knew a lot about and then had them write for students and teachers to read.

Although Donavan’s (2001) study focused on fictional and informational stories, for the purposes of this review of research, the focus will be based primarily on the findings for student knowledge of information text. The results of this study showed that when asked to write about a topic that was familiar, 85.6% of children were able to compose an informational text. Many of the younger children actually created “Labels (2.3%), Statements (7.2%), or Stories (5.0%).” “Still, the text produced by 50% of the youngest writers in response to the informational prompt could be considered informational texts” (Donavan, 2001, p. 425). And once students got to second grade almost all of the students were able to produce an informational text. These findings are very important because they show that even children at a young age can understand the difference between various genres and are in fact using elements of these genres in their writing.