This study expands and complicates ideas about what makes text complex in picturebooks. The study involved multimodal analysis of one visually and scientifically complex picturebook, "Gravity," by Jason Chin. The authors also analyzed a transcript of three third graders discussing the text. This analysis illuminated how student talk…

This qualitative content analysis was conducted to determine how Mexico and Mexican people are portrayed in contemporary U.S. elementary social studies textbooks. Three textbooks from each of three major publishers were analyzed. Findings are presented in five sections: images and photographs, holidays, Mexican people and heroes, contested…

This article reports on a study of how third-grade bilingual students drew from everyday resources, particularly popular culture, in science classes and how the use of these resources shaped how they made sense of academic texts. Six months of data collection in an urban Midwestern school demonstrated that students--especially English-language…