Explores children’s working knowledge of narrative, scientific, and poetic genres. Finds that children had significantly more experience with narrative genres than either scientific or poetic genres; and possessed more knowledge of text structure than micro-level features such as cohesion markers. Contributes to theorizing genre learning as a complex, contingent, and emergent process of differentiation and integration.

This article reports results from a year-long study of the specific ways that children’s literacy practices enhanced their understanding of themselves and their social worlds in a classroom where they were encouraged to read, write, and talk about personally and socially relevant subjects. Throughout the school year the researchers documented the nature of classroom activities and the ways that they were taken up by children in their reading and writing practices. In response to various classroom activities and in relation to many out-of-school experiences, children’s reading and writing were found to function for them in a variety of personal and social ways, enabling them to understand the complex urban landscape they inhabited, to explore new roles and social identities, to wrestle with vexing social problems, and to envision ways of reconstructing their lives and their worlds. The strengths and limitations of this particular integration of action research and critical literacy are also discussed.