As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a study was devised to test the project's materials and procedures. Selected by a pretest, four kindergarten children, with no prior reading instruction, were taught the same reading content using the initial teaching alphabet for a 20-week period. Two children were instructed according to a whole-to-part program requiring a sight vocabulary of meaningful words, and the other two children were taught according to a part-to-whole program using equivalents of letters and letter combinations. Based on the children's answers to probe questions, their spontaneous comments, and their responses to tasks, the preliminary study revealed that decoding and comprehension are not separable in most children's minds, in that children try to impose structure and elicit meaning from tasks and expect to find language meaning in the printed word. (MAI)