This paper aimed to investigate the current approaches to EFL reading instruction at a Chinese university through a series of classroom observations among 6 teachers and seek to find out potential problems with the current ways of teaching EFL reading. Meanwhile, a sequence of classroom observations conducted at a British university revealed that L2 reading can be taught in a different way, which, to some extent, was transferable to another teaching context. As a result, suggestions were put forward from three perspectives: focusing on the reading process, changing the teacher’s role, and adapting the current textbook.