This report describes the rationale and procedures for a series of studies related to reading tasks and reading texts. Children's reading tasks are examined in five strands of investigation: ability to read for meaning, ability to read for doing, ability to read for remembering, comprehension difficulties in skilled readers, and classroom observations. The text analyses consider six types of variables: orthographic-level variables, lexical-level variables, sentence-level variables, discourse-level variables, content-level variables, and other, extralinguistic variables. Overall, the report assumes that reading is a process of imposing an interpretation on a piece of textual material and that comprehension problems arise whenever an author's assumptions about the knowledge, skills, processing capacity, and expectations of the reader are unfulfilled. (AA)