To investigate what and how a child was learning about reading, a case study was conducted of one preliterate child's retelling of a story. The 5-year-old child (Jamie) heard the story in its complete form on the first session and then retold it each week for 8 weeks. The adult listener answered her questions but did not help unless asked. The sessions were audiotaped and transcripts were analyzed for changes in the quality and nature of the child's retellings. Results revealed that the child nearly doubled the amount of information she told over time and that the quality of her retelling improved dramatically. Change involved elaboration of important text elements, including initiating event, problem, and resolution; rendering of characters' remarks, explaining and interpreting story events and characters' reactions; and reading some of the actual words in the story. For the first two sessions the retellings were brief. Then the child made a shift to a storytelling approach, and during the last two sessions she shifted again, attempting to read large portions of the text. The results suggest that a child who is accustomed to storybook reading at home can use a repeated retelling activity to tell a story and eventually can render it so close to the actual text that an advance into reading may occur. (Six tables of data are included, and 24 references are attached.) (SR)