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This study analyzes how a teacher in the United States used systemic functional linguistics to design a blog-mediated writing curriculum to support second grade English language learners' (ELLs) literacy development and abilities to use computer-mediated communication tools for social and academic purposes in and out of school. The questions posed by this study relate to how blogging practices shaped a focus student's emergent uses of print over nearly two years in a U. S. urban school serving a large Puerto Rican community. This study is informed by Halliday's theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and Vygotskian conceptions of appropriation and mediation. Using a combination of ethnographic methods and the tools of genre analysis, the findings indicate that blog-mediated writing practices afforded students an expanded audience and range of purposes for literacy activities. These practices, coupled with genre-based instruction, supported the focal student's emergent literacy development. The implications of this study relate to conceptualizing how ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of language intersect through computer-mediated communication to support L2 language development.

When language is systematically unavailable to some, it is important that we not limit our explanation to the traits of the persons involved; it is equally essential that we take into account the interactional circumstances that position the people in the world with a differential access to the common tongue. (McDermott, 1996, p. 283)

This article analyzes how school reforms in the United States during the 1990s supported transformative literacy practices in the context of a Hmong‐English third grade classroom. Using methods that allow for an analysis of both macro and micro discourses shaping the literacy practices of English language learners, this 2‐year study illustrates how combined discourses at the state, district, school, and classroom levels created a discursive space that allowed for the production of hybrid texts that disrupted, if only temporarily, many of the reproductive forces associated with modern schooling. Using a critical perspective of language and social change (e.g., Fairclough, 1992), the author presents an analysis of texts produced and interpreted by participants in a classroom shaped by a statewide school reform initiative known as Senate Bill 1274, California's school restructuring initiative. An analysis of these texts reveals that they afforded language learners opportunities to display multilingual and multicultural identities and to appropriate academic uses of English.

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