An analysis of Korean language textbooks currently used by Korean children and of nationally-administered reading comprehension test items for high school graduates reveals a text-oriented reading comprehension approach in South Korea. Text orientation--seeing individual words, phrases, and sentences as semantically unified into a meaningful whole--reflects the organization of the Korean language. A comparison of the Korean and English-as-a-Second Language sections of Korea's National Preliminary Test for College Entrance revealed three significant differences between the sections: while only single texts were used in English reading comprehension, 73% of the items in Korean required students to compare texts; two-thirds of the English text comprehension focused on single words or small portions of texts compared to only half of the Korean; and the English text, unlike the Korean, asked no questions about text types and textual structure. These differences suggest that reading comprehension in English as a foreign language in Korea is less text-oriented than Korean reading comprehension. (MM)