Purposes: To explore the perceptions of EFL students on reading strategies when they read challenging texts to prepare for studying in English at Glasgow University, the UK. Methods: A participatory action research (PAR) approach with mixed-method research was adopted in the present study via questionnaires and interviews. Seventeen participants were sampled to participate; more specifically, fifteen respondents agreed to fill in the self-completion questionnaire, and two interviewees were volunteered to participate in the semi-structured face to face interviews. Results: The findings show that students most frequently employed cognitive reading strategies and metacognitive reading strategies, and socio-affective reading strategies was the least used strategy. Furthermore, most participants thought that the most reading difficulty for EFL students is insufficient vocabulary. Conclusions: Despite this current research implemented with a limited learning context (only one college) and small sample size, there are still some implications for both students and teachers, it is necessary to examine learners' variables such as gender, age and nationality that may have a close relationship of choice of reading strategies and reading difficulties. Lastly, understanding reading purposes is possibly related to reading strategies and difficulties to improve their reading efficiency; it needs to be considered in further studies.