Teaching reading in 21^st-century learning requires EFL teachers to be concerned with what students should do to understand the reading material successfully since reading skill is the gateway to accessing knowledge. On the other hand, many multifaceted issues showed students had difficulty reading EFL texts. Indeed, foreign languages cannot be understood easily when students do not have appropriate strategies to help them in an academic setting. In this way, students need a strategy relevant to their learning needs revealed in the pilot study, where students felt alone in understanding texts. This quantitative study aimed to reveal the effectiveness of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) in students' reading proficiency. The researcher involved 36 students from one school in Yogyakarta Province. The pretest and posttest became the method for collecting students' information, then were analyzed using paired samples test statistically. The findings showed that CSR covering four comprehension strategies (Preview, Click and Clunk, Get the Gist, and Wrap-up) was effective because the pretest and posttest scores indicated that using CSR as a reading strategy significantly improved students' reading proficiency in collaborative nuance. As reading treatment in this study, the use of CSR affected students' motivation to read the texts. EFL teachers are highly recommended to adopt this strategy for their pedagogy needs in reading classrooms.