FindingsBefore delving into the findings directly related to the research questions, it is important to establish that the participants were all successful readers by analyzing the participants' performance on the reading task. First, all participants scored high on the oral summaries. Although each participant chose to highlight different details, they all successfully conveyed the article's main ideas and arguments. In addition to high scores on the summaries, participants did not find the article difficult to read. They were asked to rate the difficulty of the item on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most difficult. The mean score for all 4 participants was 4.75 with a standard deviation of 0.65. Question 1: The first question this study aimed to answer was what reading strategies or skills do successful ESL graduate students use. Overall, participants in this study used a variety of reading strategies to extract meaning from the text they read. In many cases the participants were not aware that they were using a defined reading strategy. For example, each participant monitored comprehension by comparing what they were reading to information they had previously read, but none of the participants reported learning the strategy in a reading class or knowing the term “monitoring.” Also note that the strategies that participants said they used the most or found most useful were typically strategies aimed at understanding and main ideas (top-down strategies) of the text itself, while bottom-up strategies related to vocabulary or to grammar were less represented overall. The most commonly used bottom-up strategy was the use of contextual clues to understand the...... middle of the document ......-128.Leki, I. (1995). ESL students' coping strategies in writing assignments across the curriculum. TESOL Quarterly, 29(2), 235-260. Padron, Y. N., & Waxman, H. C. (1988). The effect of ESL students' perceptions of their cognitive strategies on reading achievement. TESOL Quarterly, 22(1), 146-150. Phakiti, A. (2003). A closer look at the relationship between cognitive and metacognitive strategy use and EFL reading achievement test performance. Language Testing, 20(1), 26-56.Plakans, L. (2009). The role of reading strategies in integrated L2 writing tasks. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(4), 252-266.Saricoban, A. (2002). Reading strategies of successful readers through the three-step approach. Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, 2(3).Varaprasad, C. (2006). Reading strategies: Captured or taught?. Reflections on teaching the English language, 5(2), 63-86.