This paper is a discursive presentation of results of an examination of comprehension instruction provided by widely used basal reader series. Focusing on selections in the first three grades of the 1976 Houghton Mifflin Reading Series, the analyses looked at the sorts of selections the students are asked to read, at the amount of text which they are expected to read independently, at the kinds of questions and activities that follow independent reading, and at how much of a reading selection is highlighted through the postreading activities. Analyses indicated that fiction accounted for a majority of the selections; that the amount of text read independently increased from the early part of first grade to the second half of third grade; that the size of silent reading units for informational selections was smaller than the size for fictional selections; that the number of questions that required information from more than one sentence in a selection increased with grade level; and that the proportion of the stories that were orally recapitulated in the postreading questions dropped from 88% in the early part of first grade to 15% at the end of third grade. Implications of the findings are discussed. (AA)