We adopted an experimental design to investigate the effects of various media presentation modes on the reading attention and comprehension of Taiwanese elementary school students. The participants comprised 138 students from 4 classes of third grade elementary school students from New Taipei City, Taiwan. The participants attended 5 short stories presented in 4 different modes. Following the treatment implementation, we adopted a comprehension test, the reading attention inventory (RAI), and a classroom behavior observation sheet (BOS). The results show that the overall effects of media presentation differences on students' attention are non-significant. However, students' selective attention for the narration with the screen text (NS) group was substantially greater than the narration--only (NO) group. Students in the NS group demonstrated longer sustained attention spans than those in the NO group. According to the BOS, the NO mode reached the highest distraction rate (31%), compared to the lowest NS mode (9%). Reading comprehension scores also have a strong positive correlation with RAI (r = 0.989) and BOS (r = 0.954), which indicates that higher attention rates produce higher reading comprehension scores.