English textbooks are widely used in every discipline in the majority of colleges and universities in Taiwan. To prepare college students for their future careers, it is necessary they be given systematic training and practice in reading these books. However, due to time constraints, most content teachers focus on the delivery of content rather than the language in the texts. To compensate for the lack of time available for academic English instruction, this study attempts to investigate an alternative online approach to improving student's academic English reading comprehension. Using a Course Management System, students were given Internet access to detailed explanations by their teachers of both the content and the language of their texts. A survey was conducted at the end of the semester to investigate the students' reading needs as well as what they thought of the online support. The survey results revealed that students needed training in reading strategies, the analysis of complex sentence structure and the accurate pronunciation of terminology. In addition, more than eighty percent of the participants thought online support was a viable alternative to in-class language instruction, but less than ten percent had used the facilities provided. Drawing on the results of this study, some pedagogical implications are proposed.