abstract this study examines the effect of teaching lexical inferencing strategies on developing reading comprehension skill of iranian advanced efl learners. participants were female students of meraj and shokouh institudes of garmsar a quasi-experimental design using two intact advanced classes of efl students at meraj and shokouh institutes. as the first step, a general toefl proficiency test was administered to the two classes comprising (63= subject) participants to be sure of the homogeneity of the students. afterward, both groups (54students) have a pre-test consisting of a multiple choice test of vocabulary, and reading comprehension test which were designed from toefl reading proficiency test (version 2005). consequently, the treatment started for experimental group through which, they practice three strategies (identifying, evaluating, and monitoring). selected for this study where as in the control group the same material was taught by, using conventional methods of teaching unknown words that are explained or translated by the teacher before reading. via 10 sessions of treatment, participants read the passages containing 8 or 10 unknown words and attempt to derive the meaning of unknown words from context. when the treatment phase was over, the participants in both groups participated in the post test (which was similar to the pre test, contained both vocabulary and reading comprehension tests). the finding obtained from the statistical results of pre and post test pointed to the significant difference between the groups. hence, the instructional procedure contributed to the improvement of efl advanced students reading comprehension in this study.