Reading literacy is a key object of language and literature education. However, the nature of reading literacy has not yet been clearly delineated. This paper compares the Curriculum Standards for High School Language and Literature Courses and the Common Core State Standard, with a view to clarifying reading literacy and shedding light on the reform of Language and literature education. The results indicates that both curricula construe reading literacy into reading ability and cultural nurturing. But different emphasis is attached to each dimension. The Chinese curriculum is content oriented so that more emphasis is attached to cultural nurturing by systematizing culture content for reading materials, while the American curriculum is process oriented so that the bulk of the reading literacy standards is set aside for the cognitive abilities required for textual processing. Special emphasis is also given in the American curriculum to the development of academic reading literacy. Drawing on this finding, this paper also discusses the implications of reading literacy on teaching foreign language reading.