The current study investigates the integration and presentation of reading comprehension strategies in English teaching materials for Swedish middle school (grades 4–6). A selected sample of four major teaching material series, consisting of 36 books (textbooks, workbooks, and teacher’s guides) was selected from four of Sweden’s largest educational publishers. The theory of metacognition offered insight and a framework to recognize the differences between lower-level and higher-level thinking processes in comprehension activities. As a result, it became possible to identify potential differences in the support provided in relation to the difficulty level of the teaching materials.

Employing a mixed-methods content analysis, a quantitative phase identified and categorized 2,707 student activities in workbooks, of which 588 (21.7%) were related to reading comprehension. Activities were further broken down into 2,570 tasks and coded against a coded scheme consisting of 27 reading comprehension strategies. The analysis revealed a dominance of “Searching for Information” tasks and underrepresentation of metacognitive strategies. The qualitative analysis of the teaching material uncovered that explicit introduction of strategies are rare and could hinder development of comprehension and metacognitive skills. In addition, the findings state that the teacher guides offer a sporadic pedagogical direction but could have the possibility to improve.