The role of social context and the nature of human interaction provide rich resources for the study of learning and human cognition. In order to understand these elements more fully, it is important to consider the language in use within these contexts. The early intervention Reading Recovery is grounded in the belief that the conversation between the teacher and the student during the reading and writing of texts is the stimulus for learning. In this study, discourse analysis in the form of conversation analysis was used to analyze transcripts of the introduction to the new book from two Reading Recovery lessons. An intertextual analysis was also conducted on one of the transcripts to evaluate the conversational genre versus the traditional classroom discourse pattern of initiate, respond, evaluate (IRE). Results showed that one transcript sample was a clear example of a conversational discourse style with the teacher and student actively co-constructing meaning, while the other was an example of the more traditional IRE style with the student maintaining a passive stance to learning. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.