Open Access

A fairly large body of research has documented how digital games can be used in L1 education. However, there is still a lack of detailed studies on how literacy teachers go about teaching with games as multimodal texts in the classroom. Revisiting earlier empirical work on the use of the sandbox game Minecraft in primary school, the aim of this paper is to explore how a specific game challenge is enacted in practice as seen from a dialogic perspective. Drawing on theories on games and literacies, dialogic education, and teachers as professional practitioners, the paper presents the Game as Educational Challenge (GEC) model in order to understand how L1 teachers frame specific game challenges and facilitate dialogue with the students in relation to their game experiences. The model is used to reanalyse empirical examples of how teachers from three primary schools adopted a teaching unit with Minecraft through different pedagogical approaches. The findings show not only how the teachers' framing of the game challenges reflected their familiarity with the game, but also how they taught and related the game challenges to curricular aims in different ways. Moreover, it is found that the teachers negotiated authorial positions quite differently when facilitating classroom discussions with students about their game experiences.

The primary purpose of this ethnographic research is to explore what literacy practices unfold through and beyond gaming, how metagaming is conceptualized and how metagaming shapes the players' view and relation to their literacy practices with a particular focus on the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). Data from this study were drawn from ethnographic research of four young males within and around CS:GO in the context of Cyprus. Findings indicate that players go through a cycle of layering literacies in order to evolve their metagaming. Metagaming is about creating fluid forms of optimal or unexpected tactics and strategies during game play that go beyond the rules of the game to counter the opponent(s) by using pre-existing, current, and new knowledge from past game plays, as well knowledge and information from online and offline literacy practices. These layered literacies are multidirectional, interest-based and are part of learning related to high-level making decisions. The results contribute to the body of literature suggesting ways videogames and more specifically metagaming, could support literacy in L1 classrooms.

In this comparative systematic review, we analyse how the use of digital games inside and outside school settings might support primary and secondary students' literacy and language learning in relation to first language (L1) and second language (L2) educational contexts. Our findings indicate widely different patterns from utilising diverse game aspects, theories, and research methodologies in relation to the two different subject areas, which show that they are less convergent than what often is suggested in research that compares the two subjects in a globalised world. The L1 studies indicate positive findings with mainly commercial games in relation to writing, multimodal production, critical literacy, and, partly, to reading. The L2 studies report positive findings with educational games in relation to the investigated language skills (vocabulary, reading, and writing), though with an increasing number of studies conducted in out-of-school settings examining commercial gaming practices. We discuss the findings from the two K-12 subjects using a cross-disciplinary perspective, and we suggest directions for future research.

This text reviews the handbook, Robust Comprehension with Questioning the Author 15 years smarter by I. Beck, M.G. McKeown & C. Sandora (2021). The review discusses the value and quality of the book. The text argues that the book makes an important contribution to the literature because (a) it rests on solid scientific ground and (b) theoretically it is positioned within applied cognitive psychology in educational and reading research. Thus, the book is highly recommended to a wide readership.

Bilingual literacy not only supports academic success it also contributes to bilingual children's development of identity. However, not all contexts allow children to develop their writing fluency in their first language (L1) to the same degree as in their school language, their second language (L2). Few studies have explored bilingual children's writing fluency in two languages and most studies to date have fo-cussed on Latin scripts, in particular English. The present paper fills this gap by exploring writing fluency of bilingual biscriptal children in the typologically different languages Swedish (official language and main medium of instruction) and Persian (home language). Twenty-three bilingual biscriptal children between the ages of 10-15 wrote four texts each by hand using Eye and Pen, descriptive and narrative, in Persian and Swedish respectively. The final texts and temporal information were used to compute product and process writing fluency. In order to explore writing fluency further, the role of language exposure and lexical retrieval was investigated. A survey was used to explore the participants' exposure at home and participants' lexical retrieval was measured by standardized tasks in each language. An additional qualitative study of three writers focused on what may have caused interruptions in fluency in the two languages. Results show that the children produced more characters, words and clauses and wrote faster, produced longer and more complex bursts in their L2 as compared with their L1. Exposure in L1 was connected with writing fluency in both languages while lexical retrieval was mildly related with fluency in L1. Typological characteristics such as diacritics created pauses and hence interrupted writing fluency in both languages.