of English as an English as a foreign language (EFL) reader, and how she developed her reading strategies and built up formal and content schemata in order to interpret L2 academic texts effectively. To understand the phenomena, an open-ended questionnaire, face-to-face interviews, observation and the participant’s reading log were used for data collection. The findings revealed that the participant’s L1 literacy training helped her tackle terminology problems but made it difficult for her to read to meet the requirements of her American university. Reading strategies that promoted her schema construction played a key role in enhancing her reading effectiveness.