previous studies regarding teachers’ beliefs have revealed that teachers’ beliefs have influence on their classroom practices. the current study aimed to investigate the effect of teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading strategies on students’ motivation and success in reading comprehension in the context of english teaching as a foreign language in high schools of mazandaran, iran. data were collected through two processes based on two questionnaires and a reading comprehension test. first, 58 english teachers filled out teaching reading strategies questionnaire devised by chou (2008). second, their 382 students simultaneously filled out motivation questionnaire and a reading comprehension test was given to them. the results of the one-way anova and post-hoc scheffe test indicated that the students whose teachers held a high belief about teaching reading strategies showed more motivation than the low and moderate belief groups. and the students whose teachers held moderate belief had more motivation than the low belief group. furthermore, the results of the one-way anova indicated that the same fact is true about students’ success in reading comprehension. on the other hand, the result of the independent t-test indicated that there is not any significant difference between male and female efl teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading strategies and finally, based on the result, the majority of the efl teachers believed that reading strategies are important.