Current reading theory suggests that oral language skills and reading skills interact with and implement each other. Three guidelines are helpful in shaping the development of proficient readers. (1) From kindergarten on, each year should be spent moving from oral language to print. Furthermore, the move within oral language should be from dialogue to monologue to narrative to exposition in emphasis. (2) Movement through the grades should incorporate an increasing number of activities cast in a rhetorical settings (the reader should move from a relatively rich fictive mode--short stories and drama--to assertions, paragraphs, and passages in which the reader must focus on syntactic and semantic detail). Development of comprehension skills in arhetorical settings should begin with metalinguistic games (playing with language) in the earliest years of school. (3) As the student moves through the grades, there should be an effort to coordinate joint involvement in utterance and text activities. This coordination allows comprehension skills learned in one mode of discourse to be applied in another mode of discourse. (TJ)