The study involving 35 learning disabled children (7 to 10 years old) investigated the relationship of properties of formal lessons and teacher communication to task related attention of the children. Ss in seven resource room settings were observed during three formal lessons for a total of 72 minutes each. During observations, data on lesson types and child behavior were collected every 10 seconds. Every 5 minutes, data on the classroom milieu related to the lessons were coded for role of the teacher, ownership of the task, pupil-work interactions, and source of task pacing. Each formal lesson was audiotaped for subsequent coding of teacher communications to the target child during the lesson. Among conclusions were that a learning disabled child is influenced more by the ecological context of the lesson than by within-child characteristics; that a one to one teacher-child ratio is the most efficacious for learning disabled children in terms of overall achievement gains; that teachers do show objective and quantifiable characteristics in terms of the quantity and structure of their communications to children, and in some cases these communicatons are related to the task enagement of the children they instruct; and that the ecological research model is an effective methodology for studying children. Specific implications of the findings for the remediation of attentional deficits in learning disabled children are addressed and sample record forms are appended. (Author/SBH)