The effect of teaching behaviors on student reading achievement in Spanish was investigated. A group of 18 teachers of Spanish reading and their classes were observed across two reading lessons having similar content. Each lesson was presented in two twenty-minute segments, thus allowing for four videotaping sessions. Students were pre- and posttested over a three-month period using the Inter-American Prueba de Lectura, Level II. Teaching behaviors such as emphasizing decoding skills, explaining grammatical rules (structural analysis), engaging students in the oral reading of one or several sentences from paragraphs, and correcting pupil errors in decoding were found to influence student growth positively, while asking students questions about details in the story, explaining vocabulary meaning out of context, and asking students to read whole paragraphs without focusing on reading subskills were found to have negative effects. Regression analysis of selected teaching behaviors and teacher proficiency in Spanish accounted for approximately 70 percent of the observed variance in student learning. (Author/AMH)