Recent research supports the view that the beginning reader's comprehension is aided by a similarity between written materials and the child's own oral language production. The content of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Kindergarten Storybooks was analyzed by surface linguistic form class and compared to an analysis of 5.5- to 6.5-year-old children's speech production. Distributions of the frequency and variety of the use of the form classes are presented. Similarities and differences between the Mod 2 storybooks and oral production distributions are examined to identify areas in which effects on comprehension might be profitably investigated. The results indicated that four areas of form class usage present questions for investigation relevant to the design of Mod 3 reading materials. Those areas are the use of nouns, the use of the future and the unmarked present tense in preference to the progressive and the perfect tense, the use of adjectives, and the use of a word in more than one form class or with more than one conceptual meaning in the text. (The results of this study are presented in both narrative and table form.) (Author/RB)