Research suggests that reading is a written language process that is learned naturally in much the same way as oral language. To test this hypothesis, a descriptive, longitudinal study was conducted of the reading development of eight kindergarten and first grade students who showed environmental print awareness but were not considered readers. Data on the students' progress was collected from taped reading sessions, tests of print familiarity, book handling tasks, reading interviews, teacher interviews, and classroom observations. Based on these findings a model of children's transitions into literacy was developed suggesting that (1) children first learn that print is meaningful through social and contextual interactions with written material; (2) they then begin to apply semantically based transitional reading responses to print to discover its meaning; (3) when they find that these transitional responses do not work on connected discourse, they develop a variety of reading strategies including recognition, prediction, confirmation, and correction to the cuing systems of written language; and (4) some children take much longer to make the transition to effective reading because they do not learn to integrate contextual, graphophonic, or syntactic cues. These findings suggest that understanding children's varying print awareness is essential to effective reading instruction. (MM)