More and more students encounter temporary or permanent difficulties in reading comprehension not only in a second/foreign language but also in their own native language. Poor reading comprehension can have environmental (e.g. inadequate instruction, social disadvantage) or internal causes (language disorder, specific reading comprehension deficit, learning disability etc.). However, notwithstanding the different causes (which should be kept apart from a clinical perspective), poor readers often show a quite homogeneous profile: in all cases they lack ‘reading strategy awareness’, which allows good readers to select appropriate strategies for reading texts according to specific purposes. The state of the art of language teaching research in this area suggests a structured meta-cognitive approach to help at-risk students develop reading strategy awareness, with particular reference to the foreign language context.