The present article examines the outcomes derived from a task on intensive reading carried out by university students. The main goal is to analyze the frequency of use and the success of idiom solving strategies used by the subjects while reading. Additionally, our interest is to compare the above outcomes and the reading time scores of a group of trained learners with the results obtained by untrained learners. The results provide evidence to confirm three hypotheses posed in relation to (a) differences in the use of inferring from context, (b) the times that unknown words were ignored, and (c) the reading time related to the retention of words between trained and untrained university level learners.