The medium of instruction in schools in most African countries is a second language (L2); less attention is focused on the first language (L1) at each successive level of formal schooling. Little attention, however, has been given in curriculum development and in research to the building up of the bilingual reading skills of children whose experience in the L2 is almost exclusively confined to its school use and whose L1 is relatively unavailable to them in its written form. A current theory of second language learning advances the thesis that reading and writing skills in L2 are dependent upon the attainment of oral proficiency in that language. The implication of this thesis is that superior reading and writing performance will be demonstrated in the language medium in which the child has gained the greater oral proficiency. This study examined this implication through an investigation of bilingual reading skills in Ghanaian primary schools. The results show that the nature of the child's bilingual experience, especially in the classroom, may be a far more important determinant of reading ability than the degree of oral proficiency attained, since the children in this study obtained similar mean reading scores in the two languages. (Author/CFM)