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The present study aimed to investigate the impact of explicit instruction in the text structure strategy (TSS) of expository discourse on reading comprehension among EFL vocational university students in Taiwan. Ninety-seven non-English major sophomores from two classes participated in this study. These two classes were randomly assigned to the intervention group receiving the TSS instruction and the control group with the traditional instruction. The study also explored the relationship between the students’ identification and employment of rhetorical organisation and the students’ performance in recall protocols. Whether rhetorically different organisations of expository prose would influence the students’ reading comprehension were under exploration as well. What is more, it was examined whether the students’ English reading proficiency level, self-perceived attitudes towards English, or gender would affect their reading comprehension by comparing the intervention group who received the TSS instruction with the control group who received the conventional instruction. In addition, the students’ perception of the text difficulty, differing organisational structures, forms of measurement, and their actual use of the TSS was further scrutinised. The results from the quantitative data indicated that the intervention group receiving the TSS instruction significantly surpassed the control group, who received the conventional instruction, in their written recalls of expository text. It demonstrated the usefulness of directly teaching the TSS in improving the students’ reading comprehension. Considering the qualitative findings, it was revealed that good readers employ the text structure strategy whereas poor readers adopted the default list strategy when approaching text. In addition, it was found that recall protocols may be a better measurement to gauge readers’ actual reading comprehension in place of multiple-choice questions.