This study scrutinized the effect of schema-based general English teaching and testing on English language learning in an Iranian academic context. For this to achieve, 90 undergraduate theology students studying general English at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) were assigned to an experimental and a control group. For the same course book two instructional approaches were implemented during the academic semester; schema-based instruction (SBI) for experimental and translation-based instruction (TBI) for control groups. At the semester’s commencement a schema-based cloze multiple choice item test (MCIT) was developed on the textbook and administered as a pre-test. The same test was administered again at the semester’s termination along with a schema-based vocabulary test, a general grammar test and an unseen reading comprehension test to find out which approach was more effective. Final results showed that the performance of the experimental group was superior to the control group on all of the administered tests. The implications of the findings are discussed in terms of teaching English as a foreign language within Iranian academic context.

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