A study examined primary grade children's comprehension processes while reading a particular story in which specific areas likely to pose reading difficulty had been identified. Based on the children's readings and on their answers to questions concerning the text, five problem areas were identified: (1) poor decoding or word attack skills (2) conscious decoding or poor reading fluency, (3) unfamiliar syntactic structures, (4) insufficient vocabularies, and (5) insufficient background knowledge. The study concludes that an interaction of reader and text characteristics may cause a young reader's processing system to become overloaded and that comprehension failure will result. It recommends a two strand system of reading instruction: a daily reading assignment of an interesting but conceptually easy selection, and regular presentation of conceptually more difficult selections grouped around similar knowledge domains. (HTH)