the present research was conducted to explore the effect of employing two language teaching approaches, i.e. schema-based instruction (sbi) and translation-based instruction (tbi), on vocabulary knowledge, structure and reading comprehension ability of forty one female students learning english in grade one senior high school in rivash, kuhsorkh, iran. while sbi focuses on schemata, i.e. words or phrases comprising the text, and the semantic, syntactic and discoursal relationship among them, tbi emphasizes the role of translation of the words and sentences as the only factor to comprehend a text. assigning the students to two groups, the experimental group was instructed through sbi and the control group was taught via tbi. the first four lessons of book 1 in senior high school were considered as the teaching material. an 83-item schema-based cloze multiple choice item test (s-test) on grades 2 and 3 junior high school textbooks was developed as a pretest. administering the pretest at the academic year commencement showed that the two groups were homogeneous. at the termination of the instruction period, an s-test, a matching vocabulary test, a grammar test and an unseen reading comprehension test were designed on the first four lessons of book one senior high school and administered to both groups to find out which approach was more effective. the results showed the superiority of sbi learners’ performance over tbi students’ performance on reading comprehension. the experimental group did not perform significantly better than the control group on grammar, vocabulary and s-test. the findings were discussed in more details through the discussion section.