This conceptual article examines how ready-made assumptions about literacy both frame and limit understandings of new communicative practices in educational contexts. Proposing a tripartite heuristic that interrogates the appearance of literacy in terms of emergence, semblance and performance, it uses stories from a study of touchscreen tablets in one early years setting to illustrate the social-material arrangements associated with moments when tablets became texts to be looked at, shared or made. The authors argue that a sociomaterial sensibility can not only sensitise researchers to new communicative practices, but also to the ways in which sociomaterial arrangements help to construct habits of noticing often active in accounts of literacy practice and research. It is their contention that exploring the relations between emergence, semblance and performance is particularly valuable at a time when conceptualisations of literacy are being challenged in response to diversifying communicative practices.