the purpose of this study was to examine the comparative effect of story retelling and role playing on efl learners’ vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. to carry out the purpose of the study 90 female learners of tabarestan language school located in noshahr were non-randomly selected. they took pet test and among these 90 participants 62 students were selected as homogenous learners. these 62 intermediate learners were the main participants of this study. then they were put into two experimental groups. the focus of the teaching was on reading short stories. thirteen funny short stories were covered during the treatment. these thirteen short stories were taught by the researcher to two experimental groups in 14 sessions. among various tasks two reading tasks were selected namely; story retelling and role playing the story. the participants were assigned randomly to one of two treatment groups. the learners in the first group were asked to retell the short story and in the second group they had role paying based on the short stories in their treatment course. both groups were female learners and the age rang of them was 16-22. they were given two piloted post tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension immediately after treatment sessions. before the treatment two groups were checked to be the same on reading comprehension. the result of manova analyses on the collected data revealed that the use of story retelling and role playing the short story did not have significantly different impact on efl learners’ vocabulary learning and reading comprehension.