This study examines how bilingual second-grade students perceived of their reading competence and of the work of reading in two contrasting settings where texts were regularly discussed: a monologically organized classroom (MOC) and a dialogically organized classroom (DOC; as determined by prior analysis of classroom discourse). Interview data revealed that, while every student in the DOC came to describe herself or himself as a good reader by the end of the year, many low-achieving readers in the MOC no longer saw themselves as good readers. Findings further indicated that students in the two classrooms conceived of epistemic reading roles in contrasting ways. In the MOC, students viewed reading as about getting the text's intended meaning and expressed concern about potentially giving wrong answers. They emphasized the teacher as a provider of information, placed importance on external achievement markers, and saw good reading as a matter of being smart. In the DOC, students saw themselves as agentive makers of meaning who generated ideas and questions. They spoke of a social responsibility to help others (including both peers and teacher) better understand the text. They saw discussion with peers as a way of helping further their own textual understandings, and the teacher as someone who sought to understand and learn from student textual perspectives. In light of existing self-efficacy literature, these findings suggest that student beliefs

Science of reading is a term that has been used variously, but its use within research, policy, and the press has tended to share one important commonality: an intensive focus on assessed reading proficiency as the primary goal of reading instruction. Although well intentioned, this focus directs attention toward a problematically narrow slice of reading. In this article, we propose a different framework for the science of reading, one that draws on existing literacy research in ways that could broaden and deepen instruction. The framework proposes, first, that reading education should develop textual dexterity across grade levels in the four literate roles first proposed by Freebody and Luke: code breaker (decodes text), text participant (comprehends text), text user (applies readings of text to accomplish things), and text analyst (critiques text). Second, the framework suggests that reading education should nurture important literate dispositions alongside those textual capacities, dispositions that include reading engagement, motivation, and self‐efficacy. Justification is offered for the focus on textual dexterity and literate dispositions, and we include research‐based suggestions about how reading educators can foster student growth in these areas. Finally, we propose that reading education should attend closely to linguistic, cultural, and individual variation, honoring and leveraging different strengths and perspectives that students bring to and take away from their learning. Reimagining a science of reading based on these principles has the potential to make it both more robust and more socially just, particularly for students from nondominant cultures.

Although scholarship in New Literacies increasingly emphasizes multimodal reading, some traditional perspectives on comprehension pedagogy continue to advocate for focusing discussion on linguistic content of texts, concerned that allowing students to discuss illustrations could siphon attention from the words (linguistic content). Largely absent from this debate has been close examination of how young students explicitly reference images versus linguistic content during text discussions where both are accepted as viable information sources, particularly studies considering whether such referencing might change across time. Our study analyzes nine discussion transcripts to examine second graders' explicit references to images and linguistic content during discussions across a school year. We asked three questions: (1) How did students' relative verbal emphasis on images versus linguistic content change? (2) Did the frequency of references to images and linguistic content differ between more and less proficient decoders? and (3) How did the teacher's language change across time, and were any changes related to changes observed in students? We found that students mostly referenced images early in the year. Across time, students shifted toward greater referencing of linguistic content, but less proficient decoders referenced linguistic content less frequently than more proficient decoders. These findings support an expanded conception of emergent literacy and of early literacy pedagogy that encompasses textual oracy practices—specifically, young students' talk with one another about multimodal dimensions of text.

In this study, the authors examine how emergent bilingual second graders collaboratively constructed textual understandings, a phenomenon they call intercomprehending, by building on each other's contributions and positioning their ideas in relation to peer ideas. The study traces the interrelationships of the utterances of emergent bilingual students discussing text in English for the first time in the context of a small-group discussion focused on English-language picture books. The textual ideas students shared were highly contingent on peer ideas and at the same time drew substantially on the text itself, particularly the illustrations. The authors argue that intercomprehending may serve as a fruitful way for emergent bilingual students to build on what they know as they read and learn in school and that classroom teachers may do well to build on that resource.

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