This study examined reading in a second language among 12 fourth and fifth grade Mexican American bilinguals. The children's oral reading and recall was taped. Oral reading errors were categorized and tallied. The reading performance was evaluated by a system-oriented analysis of recall and of reading errors where "error" was defined as any deviation from the text. Errors were tallied into seven categories: corrections, repetitions, omissions, additions, mispronunciations, base substitutions, and morphological substitutions. In the first four categories, the bilingual reader made fewer errors than the monolingual reader. These results suggest that the bilingual reader pays closer attention to text, relying less on prediction about the upcoming content. The bilingual group made more substitution errors, which suggest first-language interference. The recall of narrative content was measured by the ratio "propositions in recall/propositions in text." Among bilingual readers there was significant negative correlation between omission and recall and substitution errors and recall, which was not found among monolingual readers. The decoding mistakes and mispronunciation of the bilingual readers frequently indicated a systematic relationship to Spanish phonology or orthography. Major emphasis in reading instruction should be on English grapheme-phoneme correspondence. (CFM)