A study investigated the diversity in listener responses to student behaviors during oral reading. Participants were four beginning readers in grades one through three. The adult listeners included the child's classroom teacher, a listener from the home, and a reading teacher and/or one or more reading tutors. The children were videotaped reading a different but comparable book with each listener. Transcripts of 13 sessions, including miscues, corrections, and other responses and interactions were coded and analyzed to determine variation. Results indicated that these young readers faced a lot of variety, and that patterns of reader and listener behaviors seemed interrelated in very complex ways. Listeners seemed to have a preferred response to miscues and differed considerably in the amount of chance they allowed readers to catch and correct their own errors. Listeners also varied greatly in their demand for accuracy when meaning was not distorted by the miscue. Most young readers were allowed to do only very short spurts of reading between listener-interruptions for accuracy. The number and type of interruptions often made it appear reading was not being done for meaning, but rather to decode each word accurately though this tended to vary in relation to relative difficulty of stories for specific readers. (Contains 26 references. Appendixes include reader miscues, a miscue grid, six tables of data, and categories of segments.) (Author/RS)