<p>Native language (L1) reading studies have established that text type, or genre, strongly influences reading comprehension, and narrative, or story-based, texts are easier to recall and understand than expository, or informational, texts, indicating that the comprehensibility of the content may differ depending on the genre in which it is presented. However, the effects of text genres on reading comprehension have rarely been the focus of target language (L2) reading mainly due to methodological difficulty because because L2 reading is a highly complex process that involves additional cognitive demands beyond those of L1 reading. For this problem, this investigation proposes a recent “knowledge structure (KS)” network analysis approach to visually describe and distinguish the reading processes and outcomes that may be triggered by the use of text genre in L2 reading. University mixed proficiency Korean English language learners (n = 616) were randomly assigned to one of 8 conditions that all involved a pre-reading task in L1 or L2 (as a sorting task), reading a text (either narrative or expository), then from memory a post-reading task in L1 or L2 (as a summary writing), and finally a comprehension posttest. All of the participants’ sorting and essay artifacts were converted into Pathfinder Networks, a graph-theoretic psychometric networks scaling measure, that were visually and statistically compared with each lesson text’s Pathfinder Networks they read. The findings have practical implications for L2 reading instruction. Narrative texts would be more beneficial to L2 readers who do have lower L2 proficiency because of its greater easy of processing, while expository texts would be more beneficial to L2 readers who have enough prior knowledge of to-be-learned content because of its tendency to integrate content with prior knowledge.</p>