English textbook is one of the literatures used in teaching and learning process. English textbooks play an important role in learning language through material served in the textbooks. However, sometimes students still struggle in understanding English textbooks. Thus, this study aims to find out the difficulties faced by EED of UMY students in understanding English textbooks and to discover some strategies used by EED of UMY students to overcome the problems in understanding the English textbooks. This research adapted descriptive qualitative as the research design. There were four students batch 2014 of EED of UMY who became the participants of this research. The researcher used interview guide approach as the data collection method. The validity of interview result was checked through member checking, and the data of interview were analyzed by coding. Based on the result of this research, it showed that there were five difficulties in understanding English textbooks faced by EED of UMY students, namely unfamiliar vocabulary, the high language level of the book, low motivation to read, unfamiliar topic, and lengthy text. On the other hand, the result also presented ten strategies to overcome the difficulties, namely re-reading, usin gintensive reading, using dictionary, guessing, taking notes, writing summaries, using collaborative learning, asking the lecturer, increasing self-motivation, and focusing the content goals for reading.