This study examined word identification skills among Chinese and Korean college students learning to read English as a second language in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups demonstrated faster and more accurate naming performance on high-frequency words than low-frequency words and on regular words than exception words. Moreover, the difference in naming accuracies between regular and exception words was more pronounced for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. A first language (L1) effect was observed: The Korean students were overall more accurate in naming all categories of words, showed a higher percentage of regularization errors in naming low-frequency exception words, and were more accurate and faster in auditory meaning retrieval. These findings suggest that there are both common and unique processes in learning to read English for students from different L1 backgrounds.