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Abstract The present study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of the transactional teaching approach in developing strategic reading and reading comprehension skills in English language among first year secondary school students. The study followed a pretest-posttest experimental-control group design. The study sample consisted of 72 students from El-Ramla El-Moshtaraka Secondary School in Benha, Qalyoubia Governorate, Egypt. They were divided into two groups: 37 students for the experimental group and 35 students for the control group. For identifying the most important EFL reading comprehension skills required for first year secondary school students, a reading comprehension skills checklist (RCSC) was developed, and approved by a jury of EFL curricula and teaching methods experts. Then, a pre-post strategic reading questionnaire (SRQ), strategic reading interview (SRI), strategic reading checklist with think-aloud protocol (SRCTP) and reading comprehension test (RCT) were developed. Students in both the experimental and control group were pre-tested using the questionnaire (SRQ), interview (SRI), checklist (SRCTP) and test (RCT). Then, students of the experimental group were taught through the transactional teaching approach-based program (TTAP) and students of the control group were taught in the regular method. Finally, students in both groups were post-tested using the same tools (questionnaire, interview, checklist and test). The study showed that: First, the experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-test of strategic reading on the questionnaire, interview and checklist and in overall reading comprehension skills as well as reading comprehension sub-skills. Second, there were statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the pre-test and post-test of the experimental group at 0.01 in strategic reading, overall reading comprehension and the sub-skills of reading comprehension in favor of the post-test, and these differences can be attributed to using the TTAP. Hence, it was concluded that the program (TTAP) proved to be highly effective in developing first year secondary school students’ EFL strategic reading and reading comprehension skills (the experimental group). |