ABSTRACT Time for literacy play in early childhood and elementary classrooms is decreasing as Science of Reading mandates require more curricular space. This conceptual paper draws on Scollon's mediated discourse theory to reconceptualize learning to read as a “stuck place”, held in place decade after decade by recurrent mechanisms of discursive conflict, restrictive policy, teacher monitoring, and inflexible curricula. Conceptualizing reading and play as nexus of practice circulating in schools, the paper uses improvisation to unsettle stuck places in classrooms constrained by Science of Reading discourse. Taking a Yes, And…Yet approach, we align two recent models of reading and play to see if this alignment opens more space for playfully learning to read. “Yes” examines Duke and Cartwright's Active View of Reading model to understand the nuanced and complex relationships among domains of skills and knowledge in reading processes and literacy learning. “And” aligns Zosh et al.'s Play Spectrum play types—playful instruction, guided play, and free play—with specific skill and knowledge components in AVR's four domains: word recognition, bridging processes, language comprehension and self‐regulation. The alignment suggests central roles for literacy play in reading education, with implications for classroom practice and research. “Yet” extends the improvisation to address play's fluid unpredictability and sociocultural impact when children engage and wield play literacies, in print or multimodal forms. The Yes, And, Yet approach to literacy play is a tactic—de Certeau's bricolage —that makes do within current school realities while working toward immersive literacies in widespread use in children's worlds.
ABSTRACT Despite growing concerns about declining reading motivation, research on adolescent literacy has rarely examined how readerly characters in mainstream media shape young people's perceptions of reading. Addressing this gap, this study explores how high school students perceive readerly characters in contemporary television series and how they evaluate their potential for use in literature education. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory, we conducted nine focus groups with 42 Dutch students (aged 13–18) from four secondary schools. Using portrait cards and curated video clips from four Netflix series ( Riverdale , Sex Education , Ginny & Georgia , Heartstopper ), we invited students to discuss character portrayals, the role of reading in their lives, and possible classroom relevance. Thematic analysis revealed three central tensions: (1) reading was valued as intellectually enriching yet stigmatized in peer contexts; (2) students contrasted their own leisure‐oriented reading with the aspirational, identity‐shaping reading practices of the characters; and (3) reading was admired as a marker of intelligence and depth but remained socially risky, especially for boys. These insights show that students negotiate complex ambivalences between admiration and distance, suggesting that readerly characters function less as direct models than as prompts for reflection on reading identities. For education, these findings highlight the importance of creating safe, dialogic spaces in which adolescents can explore the cultural meanings of reading and encounter diverse models of reader identity, including those emerging from screen culture.
ABSTRACT This study examines how Ryu Si‐min's Appeal Brief (1985)—a courtroom document written by an imprisoned university student under South Korea's authoritarian rule—became available for later civic reading through voluntary public online review writing. Using a qualitatively led convergent mixed‐methods design, the analysis combines sentence‐level rhetorical coding of the source text (ethos, logos, pathos; N = 184 sentences), directed qualitative content analysis of 752 valid public online reader reviews posted between 2017 and 2025, and corpus‐level latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling for lexical‐thematic calibration across both corpora. Source‐text analysis identified six rhetorical resources—moral witness, official naming and framing, institutional diagnosis, historicization, empathy‐based solidarity, and civic‐affective closure—that organized the legal document as available for reading beyond its original courtroom context. Reader‐review analysis showed that selected readers enacted critical literacy practices (disrupting/deconstructing official narratives, recognizing power relations, and connecting past and present) alongside social literacy practices (forming emotional bonds, reconstructing civic identity, and promoting collective reading or public address). Integration analysis identified an articulation spectrum ranging from preservation and affective registration to explicit civic reworking. Transformative uptake designates the more explicitly civic end of this spectrum, where source‐text resources are reworked through public review writing into civic judgment, civic self‐positioning, or public address. More explicit cases combined critical and social literacy practices, while other cases foregrounded preservation, affective response, or admiration. The findings offer a bounded and transferable analytic approach for studying how historical legal‐political texts become resources for civic reading in digital publics.
ABSTRACT The most affectively powerful narrative texts adolescents encounter are often videogames, yet literacy research has only begun to examine the feelings games produce and what they do for engagement. Extending Robinson and Leander's concept of synthetic affect—feelings co‐created between humans and machines—from AI‐generated content to interactive media, we theorize computationally mediated synthetic affect: real feelings arising as games execute human‐authored design in real time, entangled with players' bodies and choices. Four features of videogames' computational systems produce these feelings: player consequentiality (players act and bear the outcomes), adaptive responsiveness (the game adjusts to accumulated choices), mechanical restriction (the game withdraws abilities at charged moments), and bodily entrainment (the game draws players' bodies into its rhythms). Analyzing two adolescents' livestreamed play of Life is Strange across 8 weeks at a community youth center, using livestreaming as a postdigital read‐aloud, we document guilt, urgency, helplessness, and frustration emerging through ludonarrative dissonance and harmony, moments where a game's story and mechanics clash or align. The players grew these feelings into criticism of how games normalize violence, ethical reasoning about witnessing domestic violence, and structural critique of institutional power. For engagement theory, we contribute an expansion of the construct in the tradition of its prior expansions. We argue that when a text's computational operations participate in producing the feelings that engage its readers, the locus of engagement shifts from the individual reader to the human–machine ecology, and we show how such engagement's traces become observable in real time, through talk and bodies.
ABSTRACT This think‐piece presents a synergistic view of literacy development. It argues that literacy learning and teaching best occur through interactive processes in which the various components, from phonological awareness to comprehension, support and strengthen one another. It also considers literacy development in terms of four broad, fluid stages: emergent, novice, transitional, and post‐transitional readers. While this view recognizes the critical role of mechanics in early reading, it also emphasizes the importance of oral language, knowledge building, vocabulary, and comprehension for younger learners. And while the importance of learning from text is seen as critical for older students, we simultaneously highlight the value of complex word recognition for this population as well. Finally, we suggest that, by thinking about the components of literacy learning as synergistic, the field may be able to move away from a view that centers particular aspects of reading as the primary skill for literacy learning and toward an integrated approach that allows us to understand—and better meet—our students' complex learning needs.
