The approaches used for reading instruction in the United States and in the People's Republic of China are different and incompatible. In China, English reading is taught intensively, through close-reading or detailed oral analysis of brief texts and with great attention to individual words and phrases. This "bottom-up" processing style, which emphasizes lexical, morphological, and syntactic skills, neglects "top-down" strategies, including proposition-making, integration of ideas, and inference-making. American reading instruction is based on current theory and research focusing on processing speed and reading comprehension, treating reading as a silent process, and emphasizing "top-down" skills. Experience in English classes in China suggests that the close-reading approach, which may reflect cognitive processes needed to decode ideographs, produces some unexpected positive results in language training and analysis, especially in the written, or more academic, form of English. However, the lack of training in speed and comprehension produces Chinese readers of English who are unprepared for study in the United States. The optimum approach to reading instruction might maintain the current emphasis on global comprehension while incorporating close-reading into the overall process, combining the most effective aspects of both techniques. (MSE)