When subject and language learning are linked in language-aware subject teaching, language education is at the service of subject learning (section 1). To support text comprehension in Biology classes, learners should acquire (meta-)cognitive knowledge of reading strategies, as well as practising reading strategies and using them regularly (section 2). What remains largely unknown, however, is the role reading strategies actually play in Biology lessons from the learners' perspective (section 3). To answer this question, fifth grade learners at German secondary schools were interviewed about their Biology lessons (section 4). The results show that reading strategies are used fairly infrequently and that teachers tend to teach these implicitly rather than explicitly. It is also revealing that domain-specific reading comprehension and the degree of learner familiarity with reading strategies influence classroom perceptions of the teaching and use of reading strategies, and that metacognitive strategies are employed largely to check comprehension of subject matter (section 5). We discuss how findings from the learners' perspective relate to strategy recommendations for science teaching (section 6) and to what extent research on reading strategies (in subject-specific pedagogy) could be developed further (section 7).