The author theorizes that her students, single-parent welfare recipients, develop negative reading habits to camouflage low literacy. She describes instructional strategies that fail to help and methods she found effective. (SK)

A case history of a female literacy student examined how journal writing about her literacy experiences increased her metacognitive self-knowledge, reading comprehension, writing performance, and self-esteem. With one-to-one tutorial guidance, she learned to assess her literacy learning from her own perspective. (SK)