This paper describes the Qualitative Analysis of Silent and Oral Reading Instrument (QASOR), which was developed to provide an alternative to the Reading Miscue Inventory for observing the oral and silent reading of students in the middle and secondary grades. An overview of QASOR shows that it is designed for use by reading specialists and classroom teachers to estimate reading fluency, defined as the extent to which the readers engage in self-correction of major semantic cues, and the extent to which readers' miscues suggest their use of meaning across entire selections. Other sections of the description of QASOR discuss its seven major characteristics and their underlying rationale, how to select oral and silent reading materials for QASOR, methods of observation and coding, the interpretation of the inventory and its instructional implications, how to make meaning-acquisition interpretations, and why the comparison of oral and silent reading strategies is used. (RL)