Dear Colleagues, In this issue, we present 11 articles for which the authors investigated various ways to support and increase text comprehension, written expression, language learning, and digital composition. The articles tackle topics such as online reading contexts, multiple-text reading, academic vocabulary, and second-language learning and consider everyday literacies present within participatory cultures. The authors examine various ways that student characteristics might best be incorporated into instruction. They also examine the kinds of texts that students are typically presented in settings from the early grades through undergraduate education. Also, these researcher authors show how students from minoritized and immigrant backgrounds can make more demonstrable progress in their language and literacy learning when they are provided with teachers who are curious about them and also resourceful with respect to how they design their classroom learning environments. The first article is by the Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award winner for 2021, Yukie Toyama. In “What Makes Reading Difficult? An Investigation of the Contributions of Passage, Task, and Reader Characteristics on Comprehension Performance,” the author examines a large data set from an online assessment system to determine how reader, text, and task characteristics affect comprehension. Toyama distinguished between low- and high-vocabulary readers and found that some traditional text characteristics, such as short sentences, known vocabulary items, and simpler grammatical constructions, aided the comprehension of high-vocabulary readers more than that of low-vocabulary readers. The author also reports that temporality markers aided low-vocabulary readers more than high-vocabulary readers. Toyama concludes that better understanding of the complex interaction among reader, text, and task factors will inform instructional efforts to support readers with comprehension difficulties. For the second article, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Lanza Tu Pelo”: Storytelling in a Transcultural, Translanguaging Dialogic Exchange, Erin E. Flynn investigated how 4- and 5-year-old children enrolled in Head Start programs used their multilingual resources within transcultural settings as a means for language development. The author used tools provided by translanguaging theory and systemic functional linguistics to analyze one child’s increasingly complex linguistic production. Importantly, Flynn shows how characteristics of the storytelling context supported and encouraged such language development. Evidence for this claim center around the increasing length and complexity of the children’s stories that incorporate the texts, cultural background, and linguistic repertoire of this research study’s focal participant. The author concludes that “teachers need a repertoire of practices that build from the intellectual, linguistic, and cultural repertoires that all students bring.” In the third article, Beatriz Eugenia Guerrero-Arias presents her study, “‘What’s Blackness Got to Do With All This?’: Racializing Literacy Assemblages.” The author used Black feminist critical theories to examine the racialized literacy assemblages of a Black family living in Cali, Colombia. Guerrero-Arias was particularly interested in how these literacy assemblages shaped the interactions that this family had with important social institutions. After providing and analyzing several illustrative examples of this family’s language and literacy production, she concludes that prevailing Colombian mainstream understandings of literacy reject the literacies practiced by Black Colombians and result in “maintain[ing] the racial status quo.” In addition, she argues that her participating family’s RLAs can work as “liberatory formations for collaborative ways of living.” Next, in “Creating and Navigating a Transborder Writing Space: One Multilingual Adolescent’s Take-Up of Dialogue Journaling in an English-Medium Classroom,” Rebecca E. Linares examines how dialogue journaling provided a recently arrived Guatemalan immigrant with literacy learning opportunities. The student, Marlón, is described as a transnational emergent multilingual who was learning English but already had extensive experience speaking and using two Mayan languages (Kaqchickel and Quiché) and Spanish. Linares used sociocultural theory and border theory to understand Marlón’s dialogue journal writing and concluded that Marlón engaged in emotional and academic risk-taking as part of his journal writing and that he exercised agency with respect to its content and the manner in which he presented that content. The author recommends that students should be provided with linguistically responsive writing instruction that encourages students to make use of their full linguistic repertoires and content derived from their transnational lives. For the fifth article, “‘It Took Us a Long Time to Go Here’: Creating Space for Young Children’s Transnationalism in an Early Writers’ Workshop,” Emily Machado and Paul Hartman focused on the writing of early childhood students when they were invited to explore their transnational experiences and understandings. The authors made use of translingual and transnational theory to frame their study and understand the poetry writing of three second graders, who were from Nigerian, Chinese, and Pakistani backgrounds, respectively. Machado and Hartman show how a teacher’s recognition of translingual and transnational resources allowed students to include complex emotional and global issues in their poetry. The authors then show how this can be done within existing curricular programs and also how teachers can more fully know their students by using this approach. For the sixth article, “Evidence Use in Argument Writing Based on Multiple Texts,” Hongcui Du and Alexandra List examined the ways that undergraduate students made use of evidence in their argumentative writing. The authors were particularly interested in how these students understood and subsequently incorporated evidence provided by contradictory sources of information. Du and List examined students’ evidence-related strategy use during reading, analyzed the quantity and quality of students’ evidence use in their writing, and compared students’ evidence-related strategy use during reading with their evidence use in writing. The student participants used the strategies of restating information, evaluating information, and asking elaborative questions while reading. With respect to the amount of evidence that students presented in their written arguments, the authors conclude that students used a relatively limited amount of such information (approximately two separate pieces of evidence). The authors also report that the strategies of restating, evaluating, and elaborating were statistically significant predictors of the quality of students’ evidence use in writing. Du and List recommend that undergraduate students need help “when presented with conflicting information from comparably expert texts.” that very young learners can begin to acquire sophisticated concepts and ideas…[and] that the acquisition of academic vocabulary in early schooling could provide a protective buffer for later achievement (e.g., Adams, 2010; Elleman et al., 2017; Hirsch, 2006; Neuman & Wright, 2014; Wright & Gotwals, 2017). Hence, this piece adds understanding of how materials are changing related to these two views. Results showed that the more recent first-grade core reading programs included more science, social studies, and total academic words as compared with earlier programs, yet the increase was relatively small. For example, as the authors write about their findings, “in 2007 and 2013, first-grade students were exposed to a total of 86 and 96 academic words (observed counts), respectively. So, for a 40-week school year, students saw, on average, approximately two academic words per week.” Better understanding of the texts students are reading can guide educators and policymakers in adapting instruction, as texts with greater amounts of academic vocabulary likely require specialized instruction. results from confirmatory factor analysis revealed a three-factor solution for the MORQ: curiosity/value, self-efficacy, and self-improvement beliefs.…Predictive validity of the MORQ was supported by the positive and significant contribution of the MORQ to the Online Research and Comprehension Assessment, an established measure of online reading comprehension. What is interesting and important about this work is that it both provides a much needed tool for the field and highlights some of the unique aspects of the online reading context. As Forzani and colleagues “hypothesized, self-efficacy and self-improvement beliefs each loaded as their own factor. That curiosity and value appeared as a single factor…may indicate that these two factors are more similar to each other in an online…than…offline environment.” The authors suggest various reasons for this related to the online context. examine[d] the relation between cognitive (i.e., habits with regard to information evaluation) and affective (i.e., interest) individual difference factors and multiple-text outcomes (i.e., integrated mental model development and intertext model development, as facets of multiple-text integration), as mediated by students’ processing of multiple texts (i.e., time on texts, engagement in cross-textual elaboration). a number of conclusions regarding the nature of learning from multiple texts may be drawn based on the models examined in this study. First, interest was found to have a direct relation with integrated mental model development, whereas the relation between students’ habits with regard to information evaluation and integration outcomes was an indirect one. Second, time devoted to text access, potentially reflective of deep-level strategy use, was a direct predictor and a mediator of both sets of integration outcomes examined. Third, comparing across integration measures, interest was found to contribute to integrated mental model development. At the same time, engagement in cross-textual elaboration, or the relational consideration of texts, was specifically needed for intertext model construction, or for students to develop a structural understanding of the relations among multiple texts. Ultimately, this piece adds important understandings about multiple-text reading. we found longitudinal changes in lexical processing for long words in early (refixation probability and gaze duration) and late (go-past time and total reading time) eye movement measures, indicating a shift from a sublexical to a holistic word-processing strategy. We found the largest gains in sublexical processing among students with stronger phonological awareness upon entry to the program and students who acquired more vocabulary than their peers during the program. We interpret the results of this study as evidence of a transition from a lexical processing strategy that is heavily reliant on phonological decoding to word-reading behavior that is more actively engaged in higher order cognitive processes, such as meaning integration. The findings of this piece show “hallmark patterns of the transition from a sublexical to a holistic word-reading strategy. [Hence,] early mastery in phonological awareness and vocabulary growth are critical hurdles for the development of lexical processing in [English learner] university…students.” specifically, I aimed to sharpen attention to the role of humor in enacting practices of ideological critique and transformation across virtual and physical contexts. Humor as political possibility expands the focus of critical media literacy beyond media analysis and production and toward the ways in which these literacies show up and matter in the everyday lives of young people. Political possibility…is fundamental to nondominant young people who experience marginalization in and out of school…. Humor, in these videos…, is expressly political, serving to disrupt dominant ideologies and claim space for queer and trans repertoires of practice. Shrodes’s work highlights the power of humor within these participatory cultures. We believe that the research presented in this issue extends and adds depth to what is known in the field concerning language and literacy development. It is our hope that this will be the case for you and the research that is most relevant to your work.