An important research paradigm applied to the study of adolescent resistance to reading—listening to student voice—has yielded rich information regarding adolescent literacy practices, adolescent agency, and adolescent identity as components of resistance to reading. Instructional perspectives of teachers and researchers also serve to shed light on the phenomenon and provide insight on better understanding the interplay between adolescent resistance to reading and struggle with literacy acquisition. For some teachers, the “problem” with adolescent readers and resistance to reading lies outside their sphere of responsibility or influence; however, adolescent and researcher voices provide a somewhat different perspective. Understanding and addressing the disjuncture becomes particularly important when addressing the instructional needs of struggling adolescent readers: Readers who resist reading risk becoming readers who struggle, and those who already struggle with reading miss important opportunities for improvement through interaction with text. Instructional implications aimed at addressing resistance to in‐school reading are also presented.

This case study examines the multimodal literacy practices of 11-year-old Nigel as he plays with assemblages of people, objects, and practices in his storywriting. The study asks "How does following the seemingly off-task multimodal literacy practices of one pre-adolescent youth across his home-community-school terrain provide insight into contemporary literacy learning and instruction?" Using assemblage theory, the article maps a period in time, the early months of his fifth-grade experience, when one boy approached the literacies privileged in his classroom with what appeared to be a certain amount of disregard, while engaging in personal literacy practices that were both rich and, at times, subversive. The analysis maps the people, signs, material objects, events, and places in the unfolding of Nigel's play with two symbolic figures, the line rider and the stick man. Viewed across time and place, Nigel's textual and embodied play with these figures demonstrate ways a young adolescent, fully immersed in and engaged with his digital and material world, "overwrites" official texts and produces rich stories that go unnoticed by the adults around him. This unfolding took place in unpredictable ways, and as it occurred, literacy practices that brought intellectual and visceral engagement, pleasure and pride, and agentive recourse to Nigel in his practice of literacy came into focus. The emergence of Nigel's inscriptions across multiple terrains provides insight into ways in which a sociomaterial perspective, with its focus on the role of affect and the body, may assist us in rethinking multimodal writing development.

The author explores the possibilities that posthumanist thinking offers for amplifying our understanding of multimodality in children's literacies in school and beyond. Drawing on data from a five‐month case study on the multimodal literacy practices of six fifth‐grade students across home, community, and school settings, the author focuses on one 10‐year‐old student. The author uses the student's engagement with graphic novels as a starting place for considering what students’ entanglements with multimodal literacies beyond the classroom can teach us about multimodality in classrooms. The author first discusses multimodality as it is typically framed and then puts this framing into conversation with posthumanist perspectives on literacy learning to open up considerations of what counts as multimodality. Finally, the author discusses ways that thinking with posthumanist concepts such as affect, embodiment, relationship, movement, and place can enhance both multimodal literacy instruction and students’ engagement with literacy.

Children experience important cognitive and affective gains through bilingualism when both languages are developed to the point where transfer can occur between them.T he timing of second-language reading instruction for young learners appears to be a subject fraught with little data and much conflicting popular opinion (Fitzgerald, 1995). In their report for the National Research Council, Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1998) made this observation: Surprisingly, given the many millions of initially non-English-speaking children who have acquired literacy in English in the United States, and given the many millions of dollars expended on efforts to evaluate bilingual education programs, straightforward, data-based answers to [specific questions regarding acquisition of second-language literacy] are not available. (p. 234)The Reading Teacher

In this paper, we explore the affordances of literature‐based, arts‐infused and digital media processes for students, as multimodal practices take centre stage in an English Language Arts unit on fractured fairy tales. The study takes up the challenge of addressing multimodal literacy instruction and research in ways that utilize a range of modalities. Incorporating the perspectives and multimodal texts of five students, Alvin, Adamma, Emmett, Layla and Yacoub, we highlight the highly supportive writing environment made possible for these fifth grade learners. The oral, embodied, visual, and written group explorations of the language of fairy tales, story and parody, found in fractured fairy tales, afforded the students numerous, rich opportunities to explore and experiment with language, which ultimately led to the production of individual fractured fairy tales written with a level of sophistication their teacher had not previously seen in their writing.