My research project focusses meaning-making resources made available in literacy education. A social semiotic (Halliday, Mathiessen 2014, Kress, van Leuween 2006) and sociological (Bernstein 2000) framework is employed in the exploration of these resources and how they help shaping the consciousness of young readers. The project examines current textbooks in mother tongue and second language education, as well as classroom practice. The study of Swedish language textbooks shows that they restrict themselves to general descriptions of narrative fields and rigid delineations of text structure. The study proposes that the reader’s ability to fruitfully engage with these fields can be increased by closer attention to the play of linguistic resources in the modelled texts, unveiled by systemic-functional and genre-theoretical analysis (Martin, Rose 2008). The ongoing study of unfolding discourse in a multi-ethnic first grade classroom examines the resources used in guiding these students into narrative worlds. A special interest is invested in how the teacher introduces fictional aid characters during joint-reading sessions as a playful way to model reading strategies. This apprenticing of emergent, multilingual readers is analyzed through a synthesis of functional linguistic and sociological tools (Christie 1998), cementing a sociocultural view of literacy teaching practices.