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Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school‐based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world. In this study the researchers examined a specific case in which English language learners (ELLs) made short videos about sustainability and social justice, to determine the diverse literacy practices such activities entailed. The researchers found that children produced storyboards and scripts, and videos with titles, and engaged in several other literacy activities, discussing what “made sense” in sequencing in a documentary story, what sustainability and social justice meant, how to report on information they had gathered, and so on. They also examined how new materiality theories might assist us in analyzing how ELLs engage in digital literacy activities. These theories encourage us to think about how human beings interact with other kinds of materials to accomplish perhaps novel tasks. With respect to language learning, such a view might challenge our conceptions of language and literacy learning. For new materiality theorists, language and literacy cannot be an “out‐there” kind of “thing” that learners put “inside” themselves. Rather, languages and literacies and people and their activities and other materials accompany one another, and are entangled in sociomaterial assemblages that rub up against one another in complex and as yet unpredictable ways.

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We describe videomaking projects in Canada, India, and Mexico in which second language learners were asked to show the children in the other countries what their lives were like. We consider how this form of expression might contribute to second language learning and allow children to make use of in and out-of-school resources. We also raise questions about the affordances and constraints of the videomaking process and explore how teachers might approach such multimodal literacy activities with children.