Abstract: Reading research on English as the first language has always emphasized its scientific nature in its long course of development. By the end of the twenties century, there appeared a specific academic society and periodicals with “Scientific Studies of Reading” as their theme and keywords. The current study addresses the three aspects of scientific studies of reading, i.e, what the scientific studies of reading is, why to conduct scientific studies of reading, and how to conduct scientific studies of reading basing on the summary of a large amount of English reading research to introduce the young discipline with only twenty years of development history. Recent representative studies will also be introduced to show how scientific studies of reading develops into an interdisciplinary field of research in recent years under the influence of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and other disciplines.