This interactional ethnographic study addresses a persistent problem in our schools--inequitable access to rigorous academic literacies. Access is defined as "gaining opportunities for participation," and the study looks at how previously marginalized students can have access to English language arts literacies, to knowledge-building processes, and to experiences of capability.

Located in a classroom in which opportunities for participation were taken up by all its students, the study presents a positive case of effective pedagogical and sociocultural practices in order to build theory and research agendas that contribute to transformations of current marginalizing practices. Also, by engaging a classroom teacher as research partner, it forwards an "action" research model to contribute to informed change from within schools.

The study builds on a current body of research using discourse as the prime lens through which to view effective literacy-building in classrooms. Multi-layered, close descriptions of the classroom's literate practices through participant talk make visible how a particular academic literacy for reading and writing about texts was built in the moment and over time. "Making-a-case" for a reading emerged as an important way of thinking and proceeding in engaging with and through text and with others about text.

Four interrelated patterns of opportunity for learning how to make cases we observed in this study in relationships between particular teacher actions and student take up: (a) the teacher provided an intellectual point of reference that established and maintained expectations for performance and accountability; (b) through the placement and interweaving of recurrent cycles of activity, he built opportunities to revisit literacy practices and to construct complex ways of thinking and performing; (c) in following a recurrent sequence of linked practices, the teacher made it possible for students to act within recognizable roles and relationships with himself and with classmates, to position themselves in relation to texts and to class activity, and to exercise their voices in capable ways; (d) the teacher managed interactional spaces and students' voicings in a purposeful way consistent with the intellectual reference point, with literate activity, and with social and academic rules for participation.