It has been widely recognized for some time that the complexities involved in becoming literate and engaging in the processes of reading require models that go beyond decoding and encoding. Luke and Freebody, for example, offered a model describing four roles for readers, where literacy embraces families of practice; this model was later critiqued for being not sufficient to deal with the complexities of the digital world. Given contemporary views of literacy that embrace multi‐literacies and students' in‐school and out‐of‐school practices, it is useful to revision the four roles so that they reflect the demands of current literacy practices. This article presents three navigational practices in order to illustrate the complexities involved in becoming text interpreters and text creators in multiple contexts, for multiple purposes, in contemporary society.