The nature of the literacy assessments valued in the persistent accountability climate within U.S. public education, coupled with an increasingly polarized discourse around what counts as the science of reading (SOR), have resulted in instructional gatekeeping that privileges constrained skill teaching and learning in K-3 settings. The gatekeeper…

Drawing from data generated during the 2016-2017 academic year, this study centred on U.S. children's design of two critical literacies compositions--a letter to Congress and a persuasive multimodal text. Situated within an integrated unit focused on (im)migrants, children asked legislators to act on the GOP Administration's proposed border wall…

This study investigated the extent to which third graders (n = 84) from predominantly low-socioeconomic status families had access to books matched to their reading levels in their homes. On average, students showed home visitors books that fell within the Common Core State Standards' recommended text difficulty range for Grade 3 (mean Lexile =…

Under dominant, autonomous views of literacy, students' humorous language use during literacy events is often dismissed as 'off task' behaviour. Taking a languaging perspective, this paper considers how third-grade, emergent bilingual students' humorous language use functioned in both 'official' and 'peer' worlds during eBook composing events…

In continuing the legacy of community-mindedness, good Black educators today consistently enact emancipatory pedagogies designed to protect Black children's personhood. Cultivating community in the classroom setting is one ritual they use toward affirming young Black children's literate character, presence, and pursuits, and they do so in the…

Within Freedom Schools, the intellectual identities of academic achievement and success for Black children are fostered with positive cultural identity and social action as the foundation. This is partially accomplished with access to positive cultural messages in children's and young adult literature. The study in this article contributes to…

In the mid-1980s, researchers began to study writers working in collaboration. Much of this research attended to what might be termed side-by-side composing: authors working on their own individual pieces and discussing them with others as needed. Others have studied co-composing--that is, multiple authors crafting a single text--describing the…

The purpose of this article is to describe higher order talk and writing about text with seven and eight year old students. Much research has been conducted with intermediate and secondary students but less is known about higher order thinking with primary grade students. Participants in this study included all second and third grade teachers and…

Recent educational policy documents have encouraged engaging students in mathematical argumentation via discussion and writing. Most recently in the U.S., the Common Core State Standards recommend that children "construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others." One often advocated means of engaging students in this…

The aim of this article is to explore how children use and reuse semiotic resources in their writing of hybrid genres in school. In focus are children's use and reuse of semiotic resources from both earlier literacy events at school and literacy events they have experienced at home or in their leisure time. This double focus is rare in previous…

This article describes the ways in which a class of 7- and 8-year-old children used writing to communicate. Using Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics as a theoretical frame, I examine what functions these messages served, how functions varied from child to child and how the practice of message-sending evolved over time. Analysis of data…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the classroom, teacher and student factors distinguishing grade three classes performing at higher levels than expected, in relation to socioeconomic status (SES) and language factors, from classes performing below their potential with regard to the same factors. Data from a standardized reading…

How do primary students construct understandings of the opposite sex? In what ways do these constructions manifest in the visual texts created in literacy and language arts classrooms? Using visual discourse analysis (Albers, 2007) and scheme analysis (Sonesson, 1988) as interpretive methods, we analyzed the visual texts created by 23 third grade…

This article investigates the intersection between the in-school information literacy practices and out-of-school (i.e. home and community) information literacy practices of a third grade student and examines how this intersection may be contributing to his overall literacy learning. Data collected from field notes; observations of in-school and…

This article examines the writing of three Grade 3 students and discusses how these girls drew upon their symbolic tools, specifically those developed as a result of their experiences with particular kinds of texts. The students were participants in a multifaceted study that explored Grades 3 and 4 students' understandings of and responses to…