This study investigated the effect of LWR and the level of passage difficulty on L2 reading comprehension. Five upper intermediate ESL students were exposed to four different treatment combinations of silent reading and LWR with low and high intrinsic load reading passages. Reading comprehension was measured by immediate recall protocol. Under the LWR condition, the total number of idea units decreased when readers were engaged with low intrinsic load passage. There was a marginal improvement in the reading scores under the LWR condition when the readers were engaged with a high intrinsic load passage. In addition, the participants’ response to Likert-scale questionnaire revealed that on average, the L2 learners felt that the effect of reading along while listening to an audio had been detrimental to their comprehension.