Two notions from cognitive psychology were examined in relation to the transfer of reading comprehension skills from L1 to L2: (1) the notion that reading comprehension proceeds by the comprehender's building of a mental structure representing the text and (2) the notion of working memory. Two groups of French learners of English (at upper-intermediate and lower-intermediate proficiency levels) participated in the study: members of both groups were proficient comprehenders in L1 French, but they differed in their ability to comprehend texts in L2 English, even when the lower-intermediate learners had no problem in processing the individual sentences of those texts. Performance in pro-form resolution in two distance conditions provided strong support for the hypothesis that the lower-intermediate group had failed to transfer to L2 the ability to build well-structured mental representations of texts, while the upper-intermediate group had succeeded in transferring this ability. This structure-building ability was in turn linked to the development of working memory in L2.