In this study an effort is made to find out whether Freshmenrnslow reading is attributed to the lack of general knowledge ofrnEnglish or due to the use of Amharic rl3ading techniques whi l e -rnreading English.rnTo t es t this, a questionnaire, reading speed and readingrntechniques tests were prepared and were ad~inistered simultaneously .rnThe researcher selected 120 students at r a ndom for the test.rnHowever, 119 students participated in the exam. The scores wererncomputed for three groups . The ' overall group ', the ' goo d' andrn'poor' r eaders groups , and the 'language subgroup' group.rnFrom the scores the overall group performed better in readingrnEnglish ana reading techniques in English at a statistica llyrnsignificantJevel by 5%. However, since mean values can bernaffected by extreme cases, the researcher h ad also tested the tworn~xtreme readers, that is, ' good' and ' poor' readers . Primarily, C'rncomputations for good r eaders in both languages showed that good -rnreaders are better at reading Amharic than reading English (221.7rnto 177.3). And, the researcher r efe rred to their achievement in readingrntechniques in both l anguages to check whether slow re ading canrnbe attributed to transfer from Amharic to English. It was found thatrnthe reading techniques results we re b e tter in English than inrnAmharic (of the same individuals) . And, the assumption got littlernsupport .rnOn the othe r hand , ' poor ' reade rs have pe rformed, much poorerrnthan ' a verage ' freshmen understudy, in reading speed, comprehensionrnand in reading techniques . The 'good' readers have showed a correlationrnof (.3, .1) in reading speed a nd in comprehension in both languages.rnFurthermore, the subgroups have performed better in readingrnspeed than in comprehension, and the scores indicate that there isrnmoderate correlation between reading in Amharic and r e ading inrnEnglish specially among Tigrigna and Oromo speakers.rnTherefore, on the basis of these findings studento' slowrnreading in attributed to lack of comprehension (which is largelyrnaffected by lack of language competence) in FLrather than totransferrnof techniques from Amharic to English.