For more than a decade, the authors have been involved in research with students for whom English is not the home language, learning what children can do across a range of practices and contexts, and trying to understand better the various pathways and contextual supports that promote their literacy learning. In this work the authors have struggled against commonplace approaches to conceptualizing and reporting research that unwittingly create or reinforce deficit views of these students and their communities. In this brief essay, the authors take the opportunity to engage their literacy colleagues in a re-examination of approaches that have become normative ways of framing, representing, and describing English Learners and other non-dominant students in literacy research. In doing so, they hope to make visible a genre that has come to characterize studies of English Learners. While there are many variations on this theme, they believe that in the past several decades, a predictable genre has been at work in studies of students for whom English is not a home language. (Contains 2 notes.)