Readers' reading purpose is of great significance to their use of text processing strategies, their achievement in recall and reading comprehension in L1 reading research. To test its role in EFL learning, the author conducted an experiment to 18 EFL Chinese learners of English. Think-aloud and written recall methods were adopted and the result indicates that readers with the reading purpose of getting information are likely to use more global text processing strategies, focusing their attention on tackling comprehension problems at discourse level rather than solving problems at sentential or word level. As a result, they are more likely to get higher score in both written recall and reading comprehension test. Despite the limitation of the study, the result is quite significant in reading practice.