In this article, we show how two transnational youth, with the instructional support of their teacher, recruited their languages and lifeworlds, particularly their border-crossing experiences, as tools for engaging with school-based literacy practices. We analyze literary texts that the students composed, showing how the students’ uses of their linguistic repertoires and experiences of border-crossing enhanced their compositions. Through our study, we seek to contribute a more thorough understanding of the combinations of student agency and teacher support that permit secondary school literacy learning to become a bridge from students’ past experience, existing knowledge, and everyday lifeworlds into work that is visible and valued in the world of school. More particularly, we offer border zones as an analytic framework for several dimensions of school literacy work for our focal students, and also as a potentially useful framework for curriculum and instruction.

The following is the text of Randy Bomer’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in November 2005.

Drawn from a year-long study in a combined first- and second-grade classroom, this article presents an interpretive portrait of two young students engaged in spontaneous talk while writing. We analyze their conversations to explore the subject positions these student writers assumed, those they assigned each other, and the related functions they assigned the texts they composed. Through our close reading of their conversations, we develop an analytic protocol for positional microanalysis of everyday conversations that honors the intertwined social and emotional dimensions of peer interactions. Countering those who would cast literacy development as the sequential attainment of discrete cognitive skills, we consider the ways that these social and emotional dimensions may interlace with intellectual growth as young children struggle to become students, writers, and people.