A study of students' self-expressed test-taking strategies for reading comprehension tests in English as a second language (ESL) had as subjects 86 Hebrew-speaking university students in Israel. The students were given a reading comprehension test, half with open-ended questions and half with multiple choice. Half the responses were anonymous and half were signed. Then all students were asked 12 questions in Hebrew concerning the reading strategies they used during the exam. Results revealed that the students performed almost identically despite question type, but the open-ended questions were better measures of reading comprehension. The better students appeared to use contextual guessing for unknown words, while the weaker students were slowed by word-solving strategies, excessive use of dictionaries, and translating. Most subjects hesitated to skim and were unable to disregard unknown terms. The findings suggest that weak students need more individualized and inductive instruction if they are to learn how to verbalize their decoding methods and reading expectations and then how to acquire and apply the reading strategies in which they are deficient. The findings also suggest that all students should augment their vocabularies by memorization of basic terms. (MSE)