Literacy across the extended school day: patterns of practice and institutional recognition

This article examines how literacy practices are enacted and recognised across the extended school day in a rural Swedish primary school. Drawing on long-term linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, the study follows students across classroom instruction, School-Age Educare (SAE), and peer interaction. The analysis shows how literacy practices move across institutional, social, and digital contexts while becoming unevenly valued within different regimes of recognition. Classroom literacy is closely connected to assessment, measurability, and institutional achievement, whereas literacy practices in SAE are relational, multimodal, collaborative, and embedded in play and social interaction. Although SAE practices generate meaningful participation and important communicative competencies, they remain only weakly recognised within formal educational frameworks. The study highlights how rural students continuously address shifting expectations regarding participation, legitimacy, value and tempo. The findings contribute to literacy research by demonstrating how literacy practices become differently valued across interconnected institutional contexts within the extended school day.