How six fourth graders experienced and understood literacy events during one year in a quality school library

In this one year study, I employed a "childist" lens (Hunt, 1991) to discover how six fourth grade students experienced and understood literacy events in a quality school library program. To locate a quality setting, I sought experts' suggestions, reviewed resources, interviewed librarians, and visited four sites. Of these four sites, I chose the quality setting with the highest percentage of racial diversity within the student population.; In response to Snow, Burns, and Griffin's (1998) call for more research on fourth grade students, I focused this study on students in this grade level. Using data from Terra Nova scores, teacher ranking, and a Title Recognition Test, I selected six fourth graders, who represented diversity in reading ability, reading experience, race, and gender.; Using a sociocultural perspective (Gee, 2001) and Halliday's (1980) "social-functional approach" (p. 37), I defined literacy for children as learning existing, new, and evolving language and language systems in text and technology; learning about language and language systems in social and cultural settings that are meaningful to the community of learners; learning through language and language systems by understanding the power of words in text and technological contexts. With this established literacy definition, I selected the literacy event as a unit of analysis.; Collecting and analyzing data were reciprocal processes. During the academic year, I collected data via observations and interviews. There were three distinct types of interviews: post literacy event, with artifacts, and with a library model. I employed an emic perspective to view the literacy events through the experiences and understanding of the participants. Using an etic lens, I applied my understandings of literacy research to analyze the child's perspective. To crystallize the findings from the analysis, I created literacy portraits for each participant that aligned with the subsidiary questions.; In summarizing the literacy portraits, I found a paradox: Although literacy events were ubiquitous in this quality school library, literacy was rare. Drawing on Swales (1990) theory of discourse communities, I argue that the contradiction may stem from differences in the school library and literacy discourse communities, as well as complexity in defining literacy.