A great body of research has been done on the impact of strategy instruction on reading comprehension and the use of reading strategies, most of which have indicated beneficial effects. However, the intriguing question is whether reading performance and the use of reading strategies would change if students are taught reading strategies in two different contexts (cooperative and non-cooperative). To this end, 45 adult English learners in Iran Language Institute (ILI) in three classes were chosen and divided into three groups of 15 students. One group considered as the control group did not receive any strategy instruction; the second one, chosen as the first experimental group, received reading strategy instruction according to a collaborative method (Collaborative Strategic Reading or CSR), and the third group was considered as the second experimental group in which the strategies were taught by focusing on individual practice and performance. A reading test and a reading strategy questionnaire were given to all the groups at the beginning of the term as pre-tests. Then, the two experimental groups underwent reading strategy instruction, in cooperative and non-cooperative contexts. The learners answered the same tests after the instruction at the end of the term as posttests. The results indicated that both the collaborative and noncollaborative groups outperformed the control group in all the three studied variables. However, data analysis precisely indicated there was not a significant difference between the two experimental groups
