Reading strategies play a crucial role in facilitating reading literacy and comprehension by helping learners actively engage with texts, monitor their understanding, and apply appropriate techniques to make meaning. This project aims to investigate students' awareness and usage of reading strategies and how these strategies contribute to their understanding of assigned texts. Data was collected through a mixed-method approach involving a survey with 141 respondents, and three semi-structured group interviews with a total of eight students. The results reveal a metacognitive awareness among students that is largely declarative and reactive. It is applied when comprehension problems arise, whereas the students’ procedural knowledge sometimes remains limited. The most frequently used reading strategies, according to the students, are Retrieval and Planning Strategies, followed by Monitoring Strategies. By contrast, students rarely engage in strategies such as reflection, critical analysis, and self-questioning. Reading tends to be viewed as a task aimed at completing tasks, for example, answering questions regarding a text, rather than an opportunity for meaningful engagement and deep comprehension. Further, some of the students express a need for more explicit and diverse instruction on reading strategies, which suggests that targeted pedagogical approaches could strengthen metacognitive skills and self-efficacy, and, ultimately, support deep engagement and improved reading comprehension. In conclusion, the study suggests that students primarily engage with texts at a surface level, which may limit their reading comprehension. The results highlight the importance of explicit instruction on reading strategies to strengthen students’ metacognitive skills and self-efficacy. Additionally, the results of this study manifest a need for further research on the efficiency of teaching explicit reading strategies and the extent to which integrating digital tools in teaching might foster reading literacy and comprehension.