Young children's early literacy development across genres

This investigation described and compared the writing systems used by a group of twenty kindergarteners and twenty first graders (all white, native English-speakers from a middle SES, attending a Midwestern suburban public school) when composing three types of genre (stories, personal letters, and shopping lists) at three different times during the school year. It also explored children's emergent knowledge of genre-specific characteristics. Data were scored using a modified version of Sulzby's categories of Writing Systems and Forms of Rereading.;Kindergarteners applied less-conventional writing systems that first graders. The differences between kindergarteners and first graders at different data collection dates were indicative of a general developmental progression towards conventional writing.;Both age groups responded to the request to write different types of genre by applying a variety of writing forms. More kindergarteners were observed to vary the writing systems across tasks as the school year progressed. On the contrary, first graders became more stable. It was hypothesized that the period between the second half of the kindergarten year and the beginning of first grade might mark a particular transitional period during which young children play and experiment with a variety of writing forms and hypotheses as they become conventional literacy users.;The range of writing systems applied by kindergarteners and first graders varied across tasks and data collections. The kindergarteners' repertoires included alphabetic and non-alphabetic systems. First graders' repertoires were limited to alphabetic systems. Specific patterns of writing systems/task association were observed. Genre characteristics are suspected to have determined, at least partially, those patterns of association.;The subjects' rereading of their own compositions provided substantial information about their developing knowledge of genre-specific content and form characteristics. The list, not the narrative, was the best-known genre.;The findings highlight the flexible nature of young writers' emergent composing process and the importance of genre as an influential factor on that process. A multi-systems theory of writing development might be more appropriate to describe emergent literacy development than a stage-organized theory. Results of the study also raise questions about the preconceived notion of the primacy of the narrative genre during the early years.