Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children's literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally…

The importance of supporting children's reading engagement and reading comprehension from the early years is widely acknowledged, particular for children growing up in areas characterized by socioeconomic challenges. This mission is collectively shared by teachers and librarians, although with differing starting points and responsibilities. This…

A team of four general education second grade teachers, who work in a neighbourhood state elementary school in a large urban area in the northeast United States, and their staff developer, redesigned their Kevin Henkes Author Study to equally value pictures and design, along with writing. They asked, what narrative understandings do children…

This paper explores learning to read for minority children who are emergent readers (aged 6-7). The research took place in a multicultural, multi-faith inner city primary school. The research concerned children learning to read and the meanings they made of the books they learnt to read with. The article concludes that using reader-response with…

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…

This study set out to gain a deeper understanding of how early childhood students, specifically Black boys in first and second grade, would respond to the teaching of historical figures and events traditionally omitted from classrooms. Contrary to general assumptions, these students were able to astutely contribute to classroom lessons,…

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…

Hey Siri, Alexa, Google, can you help me learn to read? Speech recognition apps can take dictation. Elementary, middle, high school students, and adults, who struggle to read can dictate to speech recognition apps and see their oral vernacular become written words. However, at the time of this study, speech recognition apps remained notoriously…

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…

Literacy development involves not only the cultivation of new practices but also of new identities. Drawing on theories of stance and positioning, this study examines the identity negotiations of one first-grade student with his teacher across a semester. Through close analysis of the stance bids and negotiations within a series of writing…

Inference-making is integral to reading comprehension, defined as information 'retrieved or generated during reading to fill in information left implicit in a text'. However, there are few studies regarding the inferencing of young emergent multilinguals that account for multilingualism and culture, attend to the learning processes influenced by…

The American demographic is drastically changing from a largely white, European-American population to one that is extremely diverse. This shift in demographics has impacted on state schools. Students often experience a cultural shock due to a mismatched monocultural, monlinguistic curriculum in schools. This qualitative study explored the way…

This eight-month study, conducted in a first-grade classroom in the southwestern United States, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature. It focuses on framing a theory that underpins play as a form of reader response, which I term 'responsive play'. It further aims to answer the overarching research question and the sub-question:…