Improving children's textual competence in kindergarten through genre awareness

This study presents an original genre awareness intervention for kindergarten children. The efficacy of the intervention was tested on children's awareness in three different genres: narrative, epistolary, and instructions. We hypothesized that the intervention would be effective in improving children's structural knowledge in all three genres. The participants in this study were 121 children attending kindergarten. All children were assessed on structural knowledge of three different genres twice, at the pre- and post-test stage. Six kindergarten teachers (and their six respective classes) were randomly assigned to groups: the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group received a six-week genre awareness intervention, whereas the control group implemented other emergent literacy activities. Results confirmed that the genre awareness intervention improved children's scores in all three measures, narrative, epistolary, and instruction textual competence. Through the intervention, children became more aware of the specific conventions underlying the structural level of each genre.