This study took place in the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) in Riyadh. It investigates the effectiveness of teaching four reading strategies on ESL Saudi female students' reading comprehension and on their reported use of these strategies. The strategies taught are two "global" strategies: finding main ideas and prediction. Global strategies are those related to general approach and comprehension of the reading passage. The other two strategies are problem solving strategies: word analysis and guessing meanings of words. Problem solving strategies are concerned with working directly and analyzing the reading text.The study has three goals. First, the study aims to investigate the impact of teaching global and problem solving strategies on preparatory level students' reading comprehension. Second, it compares the impact of teaching global strategies on reading comprehension and that of teaching problem solving strategies on readingcomprehension. Third, it measures how preparatory level students' perception of use of strategies develops after teaching these strategies to the students.There were three groups of preparatory students (beginning) representing two treatment groups and one control group. Each treatment group received training in different strategies. The number of students in the global strategy group was twenty-four, and in the problem solving strategy group it was twenty-two students. Students in the control group numbered twenty-one. Measurements consisted of reading comprehension tests and a questionnaire about reading strategies conducted over pre- and post-training stages.The results obtained from the two measurements lead to three findings. First, the two training groups (global and problem solving) experienced only non-significant improvement in their post- reading comprehension when compared to the control group. This means that reading strategy training did not significantly improve their reading comprehension. Second, there was no significant difference between the two treatment groups in their gain in reading comprehension. This implies that the present study did not show any favor of training students on global strategies over training them on problem solving strategies. Third, there were various results regarding students perception of using the strategies they were taught. Students mostly showed decrease in their perception of using strategies either significantly or non-significantly except for two strategies which were using context clues and prediction. Students showed more significant awareness of using contextual clues after the treatment. They also revealed an almost significant gain in their perception of using prediction. / Department of English