Twenty first grade children were videotaped during their first six weeks of learning to read in a study of the modified synthetic phonics program and the four progressive stages of oral reading behavior (emergence, contextual, nonresponse, and postresponse). The approach used by the teacher emphasized learning new words through the concurrent teaching of phonics, sight words in isolation, and target words in sentences elicited from the students. Analysis of the 111 videotapings of the subjects showed that a progressive series of reading stages could be identified from changes in the subjects' uses of contextual and graphic information to identify words. The study revealed four major findings: (1) the emergent and contextual stages may not be inherent phases of the immature reading process--only the nonresponse and postresponse stages represented invariant periods; (2) because the modified synthetic phonics approach emphasized graphic cues in more than one way, it is more effective than either traditional phonics or sight word approaches; (3) reading readiness programs should include the teaching of word boundaries and grapheme/phoneme relationships to foster knowledge of the graphic system; and (4) motor behavior has a positive effect on the beginning reading process. (RL)