This study describes the interactions of three adult-child reading partnerships in a program that matches corporate volunteers with "at risk" students for weekly hour-long story reading sessions. Using discourse analysis within a sociocultural framework, the researcher identified variation in the way these partners were constructing the act and purposes of reading. One partnership's construction of reading emphasized the "school literacies" of factual text recall, vocabulary knowledge, and the ability to "sound out" unknown words. Another adult-child pair constructed a world in which an adult and a child can work together, using their own skills of inquiry and their prior knowledge to co-construct an understanding of text content. A third partnership constructed reading as an activity in which text is meant to be played with and dramatized; they viewed text as a source of entertainment and as a way to learn about another person's preferences. Differences in conceptions of literacy within the program partnerships problematize the notion that there is a uniform experience which reliably improves students' chances for reading success. The author provides suggestions to maximize program benefits. (Contains a list of children's books cited.)