This short essay is a slightly modified version of a presentation read at the annual Institute seminar held at SNU on the 5th of December to exchange views on the function of reading in foreign language education in Korea. It begins with the discussion of a need on the paπ of policy makers of English teaching to reassess and revise the dominantly pragmatic and instrumentalist philosophy particularly working in the pedagogy of reading in English. According to the revisionist review of the present writer, the guiding spirit of the 4-skill orientation has so far tended to overvalue the linguistic and communicative functions (or grammar as is termed here to contrast with the 'text that follows) at the cost of the human or readerly values carried by signifying textuality of the reading material. Language should and is fated to reflect and realize the lived experience of concrete and individualized people and society. English is a natural and cultural language that embraces all these cultural resourcefulness and expressiveness before it is a foreign language. Strategies of reading pedagogy ought to reflect this fundamental as well as human or value-oriented aspect of language despite the limited level of the language on the part of its leaners
