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This project investigated error patterns in young children's oral reading behaviors for the purpose of constructing a rationale and set of preliminary procedures to code major dimensions in skill acquisition. Audiotaped reading samples, taken from the case study files of 21 children, constituted the raw data. Three performance indicators were analyzed: control of the reading process; selective use of knowledge resources in response to features of text; and strategies in reading as an expression of stylistic preferences. This work is an outgrowth of observational studies of beginning readers, and is intended to contribute to the development of performance‐sample techniques for classroom assessment of reading.

Follow‐up data consisting of teacher ratings and reading achievement scores (CAT) were collected for twenty children whose early reading progress had been extensively documented in previous observational research. The children in the Follow‐up sample represented two contrasting stylistic groups with distinctive strategies for reading. The data indicated no difference between the groups in general reading ability by the end of the primary grades. There was evidence, however, of stylistic influences on children's responses to measures (subtests) of reading comprehension. Children who broadly relied upon anticipation of meanings, as their entry into text, exhibited reading strategies that were not well suited to constraints of comprehension items, whereas the children whose styles of learning were more linear and more narrowly focused exhibited strategies that were better matched to the task.

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