The present study explored the association between working memory capacity (WMC) and second language reading performance as measured with three types of comprehension tasks: free written recall, sentence completion, and multiple-choice. It also examined the contribution of WMC to the frequency and variety of strategy use, as well as the differences in strategy use by readers of different WMC. Ten Chinese EFL undergraduates from a large public medical university individually read two medical texts following think-aloud procedures and completed three comprehension tasks, a semi-structured interview, and the automated Operation Span Task (OST) (Unsworth et al., 2005). The correlation analyses showed that the contribution of WMC to reading comprehension varied depending on the type of comprehension measures used and that readers with a larger WMC employed a greater variety of reading strategies than those with a smaller WMC. In addition, correlation analyses and independent sample t-tests revealed that, compared to readers with a smaller WMC who favored decoding strategies, readers with a larger WMC tended to use more top-down strategies that facilitated the global comprehension of the text. Implications and suggestions for future research are also provided.