This study examines how eight-year-old students engage in teacher-guided digital online reading during internetsearches for specific information. The research focuses on the students’ digital literacy and their ability toevaluate sources and decode complex text. We have used Luke and Freebody’s four resources model and theconcept of sourcing as theoretical underpinning. The study had a descriptive and exploratory approach. Thestudy involved 17 eight-year-old students from a school with a one-to-one tablet policy. The students weredivided into small groups to encourage interaction. Data were collected through audio and screen recordings andwere multimodally transcribed to provide a detailed account of the children’s internet search interactions. Thestudy reveals that while students demonstrated proficiency in using digital tools and navigating the internet, theyoften struggled to assess source credibility and critically interpret the information they encountered. Further-more, the study highlights the importance of guiding young students in navigating the complex media landscape,emphasizing the need to enhance their knowledge of different types of sources and the categories of individualsproducing content. The researchers found that students’ prior knowledge, such as familiarity with printed books,played a role in how they approached online reading, sometimes leading to difficulties in adapting their stra-tegies for digital formats. In conclusion, this research underscores the need for explicit instruction and collab-orative efforts in the classroom to develop students’ digital reading skills and their ability to critically assessonline sources, thus bridging the gap between technological proficiency and effective digital literacy. Thefindings offer insights for educators in preparing young readers for digital literacy and effective online infor-mation evaluation.

Although the teaching of narrative texts in primary school is well researched, there is a lack of insight into how visual models and multimodal prompts are used by teachers to convey genre-specific knowledge. Therefore, we conducted a multimodal study of the teaching practices in two first-grade classrooms during joint re-tellings of the folktale Little Red Riding Hood and subsequent interactions around narrative genre. In both cases, the teachers used the graphical model The Story Face as well as a whiteboard canvas in their orchestrations. Data was collected in the form of audio and video recordings. Underpinned by a social semiotic framework combined with Bernstein’s concept framing, the analyses revealed that both teachers focused on story events and the story’s macrostructure while displaying different orientations in the use of verbal language and visual representations. This resulted in different emphases on either story-specific or more general features of narrative genre. Furthermore, the students showed an interest in iconic and suspense-building story dialogue, but this aspect was generally de-emphasized by the teachers’ use of verbal language and visual resources. Based on these findings, we discuss the significance of studying teachers’ differing orchestrations through overlapping modes.

This study explores how graphical models, teaching resources and language arts curricula for primary school in Sweden represent features of narrative genre. Furthermore, it provides a conceptual and methodological approach for studying the recontextualization of genre knowledge in different educational contexts. We selected two particular models (the Story Face and the Obstacle Chart) because they are promoted by the Swedish National Agency of Education. We analyzed the models, curricula, and related teaching resources through Bernstein's concept of recontextualization fields, Martin's genre theory, and Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar. The results show that both graphical models use metaphors to evoke students' everyday experience and break down a narrative text to key story elements. Aligning with Swedish language arts curricula, the models de-emphasize the need to manage tension in narra-tives. Finally, the results show that the models' different ways of representing key story elements may be difficult for teachers and students to decode.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )