A study was conducted to identify poor readers and to characterize weaknesses in their knowledge and use of story structure in comprehension and recall. Subjects were 80 year-3 children in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 20 good readers and 60 poor readers. The poor readers were then divided into relatively homogeneous subgroups, using measures of language-reading comprehension, according to a numerical classification procedure. This procedure helped identify specific weaknesses in their language-reading comprehension. All children listened to three stories and retold the stories under free- and probe-recall conditions. Comparison of recalls between the good readers and each of the subgroups of poor readers showed that poor readers in two subgroups evidenced reduced sensitivity to story structure. The children in these subgroups recalled less of the stories overall, recalled less information from story grammar categories to varying extents, and showed patterns of category recall which differed from those of normal readers. Children in one of the subgroups also displayed poor perception of causal relations across story episode boundaries. These results provide evidence of marked heterogeneity in poor readers' story comprehension and recall. Certain subgroups of poor readers may have qualitatively different problems processing stories, relative to other poor readers, which may require a more concerted approach to instruction in story structure. (Includes four tables of data and four figures; contains 68 references.) (Author/SR)