The primary goal of early reading instruction, according to this paper, should be to teach children to comprehend written discourse in a manner similar to that for oral discourse because both types of discourse require decoding ability--graphic or acoustic. The paper asserts that to simply design reading instruction to achieve the subgoal of decoding (which seems most often to be the case) is likely to lead to subsequent difficulty in achieving the primary goal of comprehension. The paper describes a five-stage system of discourse comprehension, ascending from the basic level of graphic input to the highest level where inferred propositions (comprehension) are processed. Illustrations of these text based inferences as they are used by children in telling and retelling stories show how the systematic study of discourse comprehension can be applied to beginning reading instruction. (The discussion following presentation of the paper is attached.) (RL)