A study investigated the effectiveness of self-instructional strategies in enhancing the word recognition skills of learning disabled elementary school children. Subjects were 30 students in learning disabilities resource rooms whose word recognition skills were at least one year below expectancy, as measured by a standardized reading test, and whose IQs were average. The students were randomly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group. Materials used with the experimental group incorporated components of D. Meichenbaum's self-instructional approach, as well as elements derived from psycholinguistic theory and research that emphasize a simultaneous multilevel skill approach to the teaching of reading and instructional approaches facilitating the development of strategies by children for discovering invariant structures or generalizations relating to phonological, syntactic, and semantic information. All students were administered a measure of word recognition skills, an informal reading inventory, and a reading comprehension measure as pretests and posttests. Results showed that students in the experimental group performed better than control group students on measures of word recognition and on the informal reading inventory. There was, however, no significant difference in the performance of the two groups on the reading comprehension measure. (FL)