This study focuses on emergent literacy in three French first-grade classes. In the three instructional settings, teachers are comparable in age, gender and training but different in the way they teach reading and writing. The first focuses on the teaching of letter–sound relationships (using a textbook). The second presents the written language both as meaningful (through children’s literature) and structured (phonological, morphological, syntactic properties). The third teacher insists on the social and cultural dimensions of the written language (using many functional written messages). Both instructional practices and family literacy environments vary from one class to another. To observe the influence of the mother tongue education, we compared the children’s results over longitudinal and transverse tests (reading, spelling and knowledge of written documents tests). Various comparative analyses showed that the childrens’ representations of the written language, the procedures they use, and the knowledge they acquire, vary according to their educational and pedagogical contexts.