This study analyzes the effect of teaching expectancy on the motivation of reading articles and examines what kind of articles can produce such an effect. This research aimed at advanced class of Chinese students learning Japanese, and the effect of the difficulty of the article on the expected effect of the article description is studied. By controlling the degree of difficulty of the article, and comparing the experimental group’s teaching expectancy and the control group’s summary expectancy, the following results were obtained. In the same relatively difficult article, the “teaching expectancy group” had a higher score than the “summary expectancy group.” In a simple article, the “summary expectancy group” had a tendency to score higher than the “teaching expectancy group.” It shows that when the article becomes moderately difficult, learners allocate metacognitive processing resources, carry out active reading, and promote literal article understanding and memorization.