A computer-based set of instructional materials, designed to teach English second-language reading skills to university-level engineering students, is described and its development is outlined. The programmed units are designed to be used individually on the computer. The stages of software development included: selection of sentence units from different registers in engineering, with attention to frequency and density of lexical items and syntax; item analysis; analysis of theoretical support in the research on syntax, semantics, written discourse, and psychology; and creation and validation of instructional units. A brief analysis is given of the unique nature of noun phrases in specialized text, which have significantly more pre- and post-modifiers clustering around nuclei than equivalent phrases in nonspecialized texts. Treatment of this complex phenomenon in the instructional design is discussed, using the approach of generative transformational grammar. (MSE)