A study was designed which considered the effects of two sets of printed instructions upon oral reading rate. The first set explicitly required one group of subjects to attempt to read a series of sentences naturally, while the second set explicitly required another group of subjects to attempt to communicate the meaning of the sentences to the experimenter as they read them. Statistical treatment of the data revealed that those subjects instructed to “read to communicate” required significantly more time to read a series of sentences than those subjects instructed to “read naturally.”