Constructing Knowledge About and With Informational Texts: Implications for Teacher-Librarians Working With Young Children

Abstract

Although young children's developing understandings of the concept of story have been thoroughly researched, children's information literacy development has gone largely unexamined. This article reports a study of young children's understandings of informational texts and offers a grounded theory of their information literacy development. Six broad conceptual categories of children's talk emerged from the data analysis: informational text knowledge; world knowledge; representing meaning; building connections; reflective talk; and relational talk. These categories represented the various facets of children's engagement with nonfiction texts and revealed how these children constructed meaning about and with this type of text. The findings from this study have implications for early childhood education and affect the teaching of information literacy and the role of the teacher-librarian.