This volume presents the 54th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (NRC). The 2004 NRC conference, set in San Antonio, took place against a political backdrop in which the nature and substance of literacy research has become suspect. Given the current state of politically-driven research agendas, the focus of the 54th annual NRC meeting--What is the past, present, and future of literacy research, and how is excellence in literacy research defined?--was a timely one, one also reflected in this volume. Papers included in the 54th NRC Yearbook suggest that literacy researchers continue to push for new and increasingly sensitive methodologies to address the ways in which policy is positioning teachers, schools, and researchers, as well as ways to examine the understandings of children, of teachers, and of pre-service teachers. Included in this volume are: (1) The Role of Wisdom in Evidence-Based Preschool Literacy Curricula (Lea M. McGee); (2) "New" Literacies: Research and Social Practice (Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear); (3) Pattern Recognition: Learning from the Technoliteracy Research (Ilana Snyder); (4) The Mind (and Heart) of the Reading Teacher (Robert Calfee); (5) Investigating Methods of Kindergarten Vocabulary Instruction: Which Methods Work Best? (Rebecca Deffes Silverman); (6) Speaking Literacy and Learning to Technology, Speaking Technology to Literacy and Learning (Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Bridget Dalton); (7) "That was Then, This is Now": Place, Time, and Shifting Experiences of Rural Literacy (Marta Albert and Mark Jury); (8) Vocabulary-Comprehension Relationships (James F. Baumann); (9) Why Critical Discourse Analysis in Literacy Research (Leslie Burns and Ernest Morrell); (10) Investigating Digital Curricular Literacies: Resolving Dilemmas of Researching Multimodal Technologically Mediated Literacy Practices (Geraldine Castleton and Claire Wyatt-Smith); (11) Reading First: Hidden Messages, Omissions, and Contradictions (Karen S. Evans and Nancy T. Walker); (12) Thematic Analysis as a New Tool for Genre Assessment in Early Literacy Research (Zhihui Fang); (13) Becoming More Effective in the Age of Accountability: A High-Poverty School Narrows the Literacy Achievement Gap (Kristin M. Gehsmann and Haley Woodside-Jiron); (14) Adolescents' Punk Rock Fandom: Construction and Production of Lyrical Texts (Barbara Guzzetti and Yunjung Yang); (15) Spanish Speakers Learning to Read in English: What a Large-Scale Assessment Suggests About Their Progress (Lori A. Helman); (16) Dialogical Caring Encounters Between Teacher and Students: The Role of Computer-Mediated Communication in Preparing Preservice Reading Teachers (Minseong Kim); (17) A Study of Adult ESL Oral Reading Fluency and Silent Reading Comprehension (Kristin Lems); (18) Exploring Computerized Text Analysis to Study Literacy Policy and Practice (Leslie Patterson, Kevin Dooley, Shelia Baldwin, Glenda Eoyang, Royce Holladay, Ruth Silva, and Joan Parker Webster); (19) Resistance and Appropriation: Literacy Practices as Agency within Hegemonic Contexts (Kristen H. Perry and Victoria Purcell-Gates); (20) Commercial Reading Programs: What's Replacing Narrative? (Linda M. Phillips, Martha L. Smith, and Stephen P. Norris); (21) Young Children Learn to Read Chapter Books (Nancy L. Roser, Miriam Martinez, Kathleen McDonnold, and Charles Fuhrken); (22) Analyzing the Production of Third Space in Classroom Literacy Events (Deborah Wells Rowe and Kevin M. Leander); (23) Development of a New Framework for the NAEP Reading Assessment (Terry Salinger, Michael Kamil, Barbara Kapinus, and Peter Afflerbach); (24) Young Children's Visual Meaning-Making During Readalouds of Picture Storybooks (Lawrence R. Sipe and Anne E. Brightman); (25) "We Feel Like We're Separating Us": Sixth Grade Girls Respond to Multicultural Literature (Sally A. Smith); (26) A Good Daughter and an Independent Woman: Mapping one Student's Responses to Literature through her Negotiations of Competing Cultural Models (Amanda Haertling Thein); (27) How Literacy History Is Told: Approaches and Lenses for Historical Access (J Patrick Tiedemann, Jim S. Furman, Julie Ellison Justice, Jason F. Lovvorn, and Victoria J. Risko); (28) Crossing over to Canaan: Engaging Distinguished Women and/or Minority Literacy Scholars in Critical Tenure Conversations (Jennifer D. Turner, Doris Walker-Dalhouse, and Gwendolyn Thompson McMillon); (29) Two Experienced Content Teachers' Use of Multiple Texts in Economics and English (Nancy T. Walker, Thomas W. Bean, and Benita Dillard); (30) Prediction of First Grade Reading Achievement: A Comparison of Kindergarten Predictors (Heather P. Warley, Timothy J. Landrum, and Marcia A. Invernizzi); (31) Viewing Professional Development Through the Lens of Technology Integration: How do Beginning Teachers Navigate the Use of Technology and New Literacies? (Susan Watts-Taffe and Carolyn B. Gwinn); and (32) Introduction to the Program (Donald Leu). (Individual papers contain tables, figures, references and appendices.) [For the 53rd Yearbook, see ED522784.]