Reported is the development of instructional procedures to teach learning disabled and mentally handicapped children reading skills, based on their particular verbal learning and language characteristics. Focused on is the development of prototypes of teaching procedures based on cross connecting the learning, language, and reading domains. Detailed are the following steps of prototype development: specifying a behaviorally stated instructional objective for the reading skill, identifying the aspect of learning or language involved in the instructional objective, identifying the independent variables which influence that aspect of learning or language, and expressing variants of the independent variables as teaching procedures. It is explained that prototypes have been developed for teaching the following 13 reading skills: identifying main ideas and supporting ideas, identifying word meanings from context, learning word meanings--synonyms, learning word meanings--homonyms, learning word meanings--concepts, learning sight vocabulary, learning word meanings--compounds, learning word meanings--affixes, recalling and comprehending sentences, learning through sentences, learning through connected discourse, directions, and identifying main ideas and supporting ideas in connected discourse. (Author/DB)