The present research project was conducted to explore the effect of schema-based teaching (SBT) and translation-based teaching (TBT) on vocabulary knowledge, structure and reading comprehension ability of forty-one female grade one high school (G1HS) students. They were assigned to SBT and TBT groups on the basis of their performance on a schema-based cloze multiple choice item test (S-Test) designed on the textbooks they had read in previous years. While the SBT views single words and phrases as the schemata constituting texts and provides appropriate contexts for the learners to learn them in English, the TBT adopts sentences as the basic units of language and encourages learners to translate their constituting words into their mother language. Upon offering the same textbook to the SBT and TBT groups an achievement S-Test, matching vocabulary test, multiple choice item grammar test designed on the textbook along with a reading comprehension test developed on unseen texts were administered to the groups to find out which approach was more effective. The results showed the superior performance of SBT group over the TBT group on the unseen reading comprehension test. The SBT group did not, however, perform significantly better than the TBT group on the achievement S-Test, grammar, and vocabulary tests. The findings are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.

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