More than a decade from the millennium shift it (still) stands clear that advanced levels of literacy are asked for globally within multicultural, multilingual and multimodal settings (New London Group, 1996). In many European countries, and so also in Sweden, contemporary information- and communication technologies have highly increased in number and importance. Children encounter, interpret and interact with texts of-line and on-line. Further, international comparisons of reading competence affect how we view and think about literacy education both on local and national levels. This paper focuses on children’s use of texts and literacy learning during the middle-school years in a multilingual and multicultural setting in Sweden. The central focus of the study are children’s experiences of texts inside and outside of school, how they use texts and in what contexts. A further interest is to elucidate the conditions and possibilities that everyday activities surrounding texts draw upon and what they mean for children’s meaning-making, identity-making and literacy learning over the long run. This study employs a didactical and pedagogical orientation. In it, conditions and possibilities for the learning of reading, writing and reading comprehension are a specific focus, while other forms of expressions, texts and media and their interplay are more generally addressed. The concept of text used in this presentation are broad in scope, encompassing the visual, spoken and audial modalities that often appear together and in different media. Results will be presented from an ethnographical study where children’s use of texts has been investigated and mapped. The study also aims to explore the conditions and possibilities of children’s meaning- and identity making through texts. The participating children were nine years of age when the study started 2010 and eleven when it ended in 2012.

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