There is a growing recognition of the way in which instruction can be enriched by engagement with narrative, and teachers can learn much from studying interactions between parents and children where the activity seems unforced and enjoyable and where parent and child seem most in harmony. Such a pair are three-year-old Anna and her mother, who is reading the child a familiar story. An examination of the patterning of the story reading in terms of discourse analysis and narrative structure shows that the 39 conversational utterances (there are only two sentences of printed text in the story) that may appear random or disorderly to the casual observer actually have a coherence within their own physical context. Anna is the one who decides what shall be talked about, but her mother supports Anna's initiatives in a way that shifts the discourse towards the explicitness and formal completeness of written language. As they talk, they are both concerned in realizing the narrative, in actualizing the potential narrative structures and in building a complex, textured and coherent whole. The conversation provides Anna with an external model for the internal conversation with the author that is necessary if she is to make the narrative texts she encounters more firmly her own. A transcript of the audiotape is provided, with a concurrent description of the story's text and illustrations. (NKA)