This study focuses on the progress of six middle schoolers in the St. Louis public schools who had been placed in 6th grade even though they had only first grade-level reading skills. It seeks to answer the following question: What effect will the use of Reading Recovery techniques and individualized reading strategies have on middle school English language learners struggling to read English? During individualized tutoring sessions, the students were taught specific reading learning strategies, including the following: focusing on word families; rerunning, which involves reading a string of words or a whole sentence to capture the grammatical and semantic sense of the text; using context clues; and stressing the necessity that a text must make sense. Various types of reading were also used--independent, silent reading; echo reading; reading aloud; paired reading; and listening to taped books as students follow along in the text. The following conclusions were drawn: these students' attitudes about themselves as readers have improved; they no longer skip unknown words and have begun to use word family and context clues to help them make sense of print; their knowledge of sight words has increased; and their scores on a standardized reading test showed an average gain that was higher than that obtained by peers who did not participate in this project. (KFT)