This study aimed to discover semantic and syntactic problems Persian native speakers might have while reading English and Persian texts and different strategies they use to overcome those problems. To this end, a convenient sample of 40 intermediate students studying English Literature at Shiraz University was selected. Twenty of them were asked to do a cloze test in Persian (L1) and the rest to do the English version of the same text (L2). Then, a questionnaire was administered to find out the strategies they used while doing the cloze tests. Results showed that Persian native speakers mostly used syntactic strategies while reading an English text and semantic ones while reading the Persian version of the same text. This finding highlights the need for a stronger emphasis on different syntactic features of languages in the teaching of reading English to Persian native speakers.