Talk story, a speech event common among the Native Hawaiian, and signifying, an African American social discourse, are two of the known culturally responsive models by Kathryn Au (1980) and Carol Lee (1995), respectively. This paper conducted a close reading (Bass and Linkon, 2008) of talk story and signifying in order to draw their implications for the teaching of multicultural students in the Republic of Korea. These original culture-specific models were chosen as materials for close reading because they were both applied in teaching language and literacy, and they both spoke of communicating. In this paper, close reading involved the analyses of inquiry, text, theory, and argument of the materials reviewed as posited by Bass and Linkon (2008). Generally, the concepts of speech economy and context (Au, 1980) and the theories of sociocognition and schema (Lee, 1995) explain and validate the implications of culturally responsive teaching for the Korean context of linguistic and cultural diversity. Specifically, Au's (1980) and Lee's (1995) culturally responsive literacy instruction calls for changes to typical school instructional situations, such as changes in teachers’ and students’ roles, changes in the patterns of interaction and classroom activities, and changes in assessment.