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The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to explore the teacher/student reading conferences in two first grade teachers' classrooms in one primary school. Sixteen one-to-one reading conferences were recorded and transcribed over a two-month period and coded for content as related to the CAFÉ (Boushey & Moser, 2009) model of reading instruction, which the teachers used daily. We found that the two teachers placed heavy emphasis on students' reading accuracy (the "A" in CAFÉ) and did not spend as much time working on comprehension, fluency, or expanding vocabulary (the C, F, and E in CAFÉ). We suggest teachers work toward balancing instruction in these areas during individual reading conferences with students and that they may benefit from recording and analyzing their conferences for teaching points and related prompts.

KEYWORDS: early reading instruction, conferring with readers, reading strategy prompts

Teachers who meet with students daily about their reading work often wonder, "Am I saying the right things?" and "What should I tell my students in order to move them along as readers?" Johnston (2004) states, "Talk is the central tool of [teachers'] trade" and "with it they mediate children's activity and experience" (p. 4). Such talk occurs during daily one-to-one reading conferences between teachers and students. During these conversations, teachers and students negotiate the meaning of a text through work on skills and strategies. CAFÉ, the reading workshop model used by the teachers involved in this study, is a model for teaching skills and strategies of proficient readers during the reading workshop and is a "flexible system that can be tailored to individual classrooms" (Boushey & Moser, 2009, p. 2). CAFÉ is an acronym for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expansion of vocabulary.

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to explore teacher-student reading conferences in two first-grade classrooms in one primary school. The teacher considers the reading work the child has previously done and determines the content of reading conferences after listening to the child read. The teacher is then charged with choosing one or two teaching points related to a dimension of the CAFÉ model. We wanted to know on what areas these two experienced first-grade teachers, who have studied the CAFÉ model extensively, chose to focus during their conferences...

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