Assuming that although the pre-operational child generates syntactic utterances, it cannot be inferred that he can comprehend the process of analyzing or synthesizing words or utterances as specimens, it would follow that trying to teach pre-operational children to read by decomposing words or sentences, on the assumption that words and the relations between words can then be synthesized, may be analogous to trying to train Piagetian operations. To determine what reasoning tasks we ask the child to perform when we ask him to analyze printed words so that he can pronounce them, the instructional steps in several primers and first readers of several basal reader series were examined. This was approached in two ways: (1) to translate the logical steps that are required of the child by each lesson into descriptive, abstract notations; and (2) to develop an analogue of the set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences for many of the phonics lessons in the teachers' manuals. Results from using the analogues indicated that children have much more difficulty with rules that involve changes from a regular pattern, children were often able to do the analogue lessons more easily than the parallel phonics lessons, and the same basic concepts are taught using different places within the same manual. (HOD)