An analysis of reading instructional research reveals eight analytic categories for organizing various aspects of instruction. The first three categories describe the rhetorical distinctions that are often made about instruction, providing a background to the analysis of the instruction found in current research. The distinctions in these categories result in four possible modes of instruction: (1) textbook-bound/designed, (2) textbook-bound/responsive, (3) textbook-free/designed, and (4) textbook-free/responsive. However, only the textbook-bound/designed mode of instruction is reflected in the reported research. Categories 4 and 5 describe the global ingredients that are descriptive of the instructional mode. They show that textbook-bound and designed modes of instruction always focus on student response to directed practice and call for organizational behaviors, social management behaviors, and verbal-pedagogical behaviors by teachers. Categories 6 through 8 describe the specific pedagogical behaviors being studied in the reading instructional research. They reveal two approaches that seem to dominate the research: one--spontaneous generation--is based on the belief that the key to learning is implicit in the act of completing the task and that teachers can be most helpful by exposing students to the task in various ways; the second--teacher explanation--assumes that some students will not be sensitive to such implicit cues and that teachers must make explicit for them the processing that undergirds the task. (HOD)