Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing—biography and report—composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students’ understanding of the nature of science. These texts were analyzed for a range of schematic, lexical, and grammatical features that instantiate the two target genres. Statistical and descriptive analyses revealed that the students demonstrated a fairly mature control over the schematic and lexical features that realize the purpose of either genre and relied heavily on the grammatical resources characteristic of everyday registers in constructing both genres. Additionally, there was a positive relationship between the students’ genre/register familiarity and the holistic quality of their writing, and the students’ reading proficiency was a significant predictor of their genre familiarity and holistic writing quality, but not their register understanding. These findings suggest that learning the grammatical resources characteristic of academic registers remains a major and potentially daunting task for many adolescents.

事实写作是美国 K-12 学校教育的一个关键宏观体裁，在工作场所和社会中也受到重视。本研究检查了事实写作的两个子体裁——传记和报告——的体裁和语域特征，由 48 名六年级学生在一个关于科学家和科学相关职业的课程单元组成，旨在培养学生对科学本质的理解。分析了这些文本的一系列图解、词汇和语法特征，这些特征实例化了这两种目标类型。统计和描述性分析表明，学生对实现任一体裁目的的图解和词汇特征表现出相当成熟的控制，并在构建这两种体裁时严重依赖日常语域的语法资源特征。此外，学生的体裁/语域熟悉度与其写作的整体质量之间存在正相关关系，学生的阅读能力是其体裁熟悉度和整体写作质量的重要预测因素，但不是他们对语域理解的重要预测因素。这些发现表明，学习学术语域的语法资源特征对于许多青少年来说仍然是一项主要且可能令人生畏的任务。