The aim of this study is to investigate multilingual students’ identity constructions in their participation in different digital literacy practices. Theoretically, we depart from a translanguaging perspective and a social understanding of literacy from the field of New Literacy Studies. The data was constructed through qualitative interviews with eleven multilingual students in Sweden, and analysed through positioning analysis. The results show that the students use their multilingual repertoires in a variety of digital contexts for entertainment, learning, and socialising purposes. From the positioning analysis, three recurring themes emerged: positionings in relation to i. their heritage, ii. notions of ‘Swedishness”, and iii. transcultural identities. However, there is a range of variations in students’ approaches to their linguistic repertoires, which is further discussed in terms of identity constructions, as well as what teachers in monolingual schools settings can learn from the students’ everyday digital literacy practices and identity processes.

This study addresses normative orientations to smartphone use in Swedish upper-secondary classrooms. We present a Nexus Analysis from a policy enactment perspective of a material comprising ethnographic interviews, classroom video observations, and smartphone screen capture, investigating how a cultural conception of the smartphone as a source of disturbance is negotiated in discursive and embodied social action. Three groups of policy actors – head teachers, teachers, and students – balance competing agendas such as digitalization strategies, popular media narratives, and student autonomy and peer relationship maintenance. There is a tension between orientations to the smartphone as a legitimate resource for socialization and learning in the digitalized classroom, but also as an exception to desired digitalization – a potential threat to the social and disciplinary order of the classroom. Notably, the students display considerable awareness of such tensions, in reflective comments made in interviews and in displayed strategies for managing their smartphones in class.

This article presents results from a case study that examines reading instruction practices in a linguistically heterogeneous class in year 3. In this school the proportion of newly arrived students has increased significantly in a short time and the article focuses on classroom observations and a teacher interview about the work with reading instruction in this particular class. The theoretical framework is based on Cummins’ The Literacy Engagement Framework and theories about teachers’ beliefs. The results show how in reading instruction students' understanding is supported through the teacher's work with extending the language and through support in students' meaning-making (scaffold meaning). The students' background knowledge is activated when connections between text content and the students' everyday life are made, but multilingual identities are seldom affirmed or made visible. The focus of reading instruction is primarily to support linguistic preunderstanding and correctness. Reading homework is an important part of reading instruction and is practiced in cooperation with multilingual parents in a language they often do not know. Strongly present are the teacher’s beliefs about students' linguistic repertoires as a resource primarily for learning Swedish, as well as beliefs about a separation between the languages of multilingual individuals.