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This qualitative study focuses on Grade 6 students’ possibilities to engage in disciplinary writing practices in history teaching in a school located in a socially disadvantaged and linguistically diverse area. The aim is to contribute knowledge about how students negotiate different literacy expectations in the teaching. The researcher used ethnographic methods to follow one teacher and two groups of Grade 6 students for 12 weeks’ teaching about the Vasa era in Swedish history. The material used consists of samples of students writing, parts of the text material they studied, and written questions they answered in tests and pre-writing discussion. In the analysis, systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) and thematic content analysis were employed to develop categories of literacy expectations based on the written questions. SFL was also used to analyze samples of the students’ writing and relevant textbook material. The findings show that the expectations increased in a final test because most questions required causal reasoning. In contrast, the questions used in text discussions and homework tests conveyed a variety of literacy expectations, with an emphasis on chronological reconstructions of events. While some students adjusted their writing to causal reasoning, others relied on a reconstruct approach that adhered closely to the simple text material that was chronologically structured. Outlier examples showed students using multimodal representations, a substitute teacher’s oral elaboration on a text, and resources of learner language in their answers. Implications for teaching that support all students’ engagement in disciplinary practices of history are discussed.

Given young children’s frequent use of the internet and the expectations formulated in policy documents such as the Swedish national curriculum, teachers need to promote critical awareness about information found online, even in the earliest years of schooling. Responding to the need for more information about how first-graders understand the internet, we report on findings from focus group interviews concerning what students in Grade 1 think the internet is and what kind of experiences and linguistic resources they draw upon to express their understanding. Based on thematic and systemic-functional linguistic analysis, the results show that the children mostly express an understanding of the internet as something concrete, such as an app, as something encapsulated in apps or hardware and, more generally, as an enabler for the use of different apps. Students connections to using YouTube and games are prevalent, and their understanding of the internet is shaped by experiences of screen interactions when using these apps. On rare occasions, students hesitantly tried to formulate abstract perspectives concerning what the internet is or what it means. Possible directions for promoting and researching a more abstract understanding in pedagogical practice are discussed.