The purpose of this study was to identify middle school students’ strategies-use patterns for critical reading and to discover discrepancies between the actual pattern and teachers’ expectations. This study analyzed 56 self-reported data from ninth grade students after critical reading and 16 surveyed data from secondary school Korean language teachers. This investigation was based on an inventory of 21 specific reading strategies in three categories: identifying and learning text content, monitoring, and evaluating. Results showed considerable discrepancies between student strategies-use patterns and teacher expectations. Generally, The the students used the strategies evenly regardless of the three categories. In contrast, the teachers thought that these readers should use strategies in the Identifying and learning text content category to a lesser extent, and should instead use strategies in the Evaluating category to a greater extent. In addition, the students actively used strategies for predicting text and identifying explicit information, but they did not as much for adjusting strategy and inferring implicit perspectives, as contrasted with the teacher’s expectation. These discrepancies indicate that the strategy for critical reading is being instructed ineffectively in school classes.