Focusing on common misconceptions about children who have trouble learning to read, two papers discuss new ways to think about and teach these students. "Revaluing Readers and Reading," by Kenneth S. Goodman, argues that troubled readers should not be thought of as sufferers from an illness, but as strong, healthy individuals fully capable of learning how to read. To help prepare educators to build on these strengths, Goodman discusses some basic facts about how reading, as a unitary psycholinguistic process, works and develops. Geoffrey Williams and David Jacks' paper, "The Role of Story: Learning to Read in a Special Education Class," explores (1) the assumption that children who have trouble learning to read are deficient; (2) whether a change in approach that emphasizes the social uses of written language might, over an extended period of time, enable them to read more confidently; and (3) the practical management of collaborative language research in a special education setting. To accomplish these purposes, the article details the progress made in 1 year by 13 elementary children in a special education class. The class emphasized extending the functional range of written stories by employing what children already knew about the oral use of narrative. (JD)