This study illuminates a teacher's discursive strategies for promoting understanding of literary language in a linguistically diverse Swedish classroom. By means of field notes and audio recordings, a Grade 4 teacher's read-aloud of the award-winning picture book The Legend of Sally Jones was documented and analyzed employing concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the findings show that the teacher used a rich variety of discursive strategies to make specialized terms and literary descriptions available to the students. Apart from using question–answer strategies and commenting on the text in clarifying ways, the teacher made linguistic alterations to either expand or simplify the literary language. The expansive strategies were particularly salient, entailing clarifying paraphrases or subtly infused additions to expand literary meaning. The significance of the strategies to support students’ understanding of literary language and immersion in stories is discussed.