Abstract
Although there has been a lot of research on young children learning about the book language of written story discourse recently, very little is known about how they acquire understandings of other nonstory genres. This article first describes several distinctive discourse features of typical information books written for young children by comparing them to aspects of book language realized in typical storybooks. Then 4 kindergarteners’ repeated “pretend readings” of three typical information books are analyzed to reveal the strategies by which these children learn the characteristic linguistic properties of this genre.