A study investigated reading performance in one dimension of the language experience approach--the dictation of a story to accompany a wordless picture book. A miscue analysis procedure was used to describe the strategies and miscues evidenced by eight first grade beginning readers while reading a basal text story and while reading a dictated story. The oral readings of both texts were taped and coded using the Evaluation Form of the Reading Miscue Inventory developed by Y. Goodman and C. Burke. These data were assessed to determine strategy utilization of the readers on each text. In addition, both the structure of the texts and the reader's perception of reading were investigated in order to better explain strategy utilization. The results showed that language experience activities, specifically dictated stories, can enable children to process print more proficiently. The measures of readers' preceptions of reading showed that all of the children in the study held a similar theoretical model--somewhere between a phonics model and a skills model--of reading. Measures of text structure indicated that on both a word level and a syntactic level the stories produced by the students were more complex than the text story; on a semantic level, the dictated stories were generally better formed than were the text stoies. (FL)