Commenting on R&T's ‘Developing Linguistic Literacy’ is not an easy task. Their attempt addresses precisely the right questions, in all their complexities and breadth, centring and bundling these questions in strategic and potentially novel ways, and thereby exploring new territories and encouraging investigators to enter these territories. However, I still feel left with a sense of incompleteness and exclusion when it comes to a more discursive orientation to theorizing literacy and development.