The aim of reading strategy instruction is to help learners become more capable of facing new reading tasks, making sense of what they read and, eventually, becoming more skilled, strategic and competent readers. The purpose of this study is twofold: firstly, it investigates the impact of a programme on reading strategy instruction on the reading competence of young learners. Secondly, it studies if there is any transfer across skills when it comes to strategy instruction. For our research we adopted a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design. Our participants were children (age 11–13) at a school in the Basque Country in Spain. Each class consisted of 25 students, two acting as experimental groups, which received the strategy instruction in reading, and the other two acting as control groups. Our results showed that the strategy training had a statistically significant impact on the children’s development of reading competence, which showed how skill-specific instruction can be an effective form of instruction for young-beginner readers. However, we did not see a direct relationship between the reading and listening competence of both groups. The study points out some consequences for the cross-linguistic influence of learning strategies in multilingual education.