A study was conducted to examine (1) the type of instruction most likely to help both normal and learning disabled readers use the analogy strategy in reading novel words, and (2) how fifth grade disabled readers compared with normal second and fifth grade readers. Analogy strategies, the most abstract of the reading strategies, are generally associated with older, more competent readers, who compare new letter combinations in unknown words with already known combinations, thereby making generalizations about the unknown word based on what is known. The subjects, 80 students in each of the three classifications, were randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions (verbal instructions only, priming only, both verbal instructions and priming, and control), tested on a word recognition task, and retested with a transfer task. The results showed that the three instructional conditions were equally and significantly better than the control condition in getting the subjects to use analogy strategies. Subjects in the condition "verbal instructions only" scored significantly better than the other groups on the transfer of training task. It was also shown that the fifth grade disabled readers and the second grade normal children were significantly different from the normal fifth grade students and consistently applied similar strategies. (RL)