A study examined what children do within a teacher/learner relationship as they learn about text. The two questions guiding the study are: (1) how does a child's relationship with his teacher help him learn to read and write, and (2) what qualities of this relationship stand out as essential to the meaning making process? An account of the tutoring relationship with the subject of the study, a first-grade student, was recorded in the form of ongoing field notes. Results indicated that shifting to a relational perspective of literacy learning enables a researcher to see and to value elements of the child's literacy learning that goes beyond his interaction with text. The aspects of ritual, physical closeness, shared objects, shared meaning making, and celebration are the themes of the relationship which are common to a child's early language and are well documented in the interactions of mothers and young children. Findings suggest that perhaps for some children, part of their learning to read and write in school is dependent upon this transposition of earlier relational dimensions of language learning to the classroom. Our current conceptualization of learning to read and write as the development of a set of cognitive and linguistic procesess, rather than a personal and social task learned through relationship, may be limiting our ability to provide effective instruction. (Contains 7 references.) (CR)