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Discussed is an oral reading procedure for children with reading problems which assesses a reader's competency through an analysis of comprehension evidenced by meaningful versus non-meaningful alterations to the reading text. It is explained that this analysis Indicates that the poor reader's needs frequently may be at the syntactic and semantic levels, rather than the word level. Examples are given of five narratives coded for type of textual alteration. Described are potential misplacements of readers in material below their conceptual needs because of word error rather than syntactic and semantic error counts. (CL) Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished * materials nct available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort * * to obtain the best copy available. Nevertheless, items of marginal * * reproducibility are often encountered and this affects the vality * * of the microfiche and hardcopy reproductions ERIC makes available * * via the ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS). EDRS is not * responsible for the quality of the original document. Reproductions * * supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original. U S DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION A WELFAR