The present study was conducted to determine the difference between reciprocal teaching only and explicit teaching of strategies before reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension of Iranian female EFL learners. The 63 participants were divided into two groups of RTO and ET-RT. There were two classes of 16 participants in RTO group and two classes of 16 and 15 participants in ET-RT group. Before starting the lesson, a pretest of reading comprehension with 60 multiple choice items was administered. One group received reciprocal teaching only and the other received explicit teaching of strategies before reciprocal teaching. The reciprocal teaching in both groups was conducted in 19 sessions. At the end, a posttest of reading comprehension with 60 multiple choice items was administered. The result of the t-tests showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the mean rank score of the ET-RT and RTO groups on the pretest and posttest reading comprehension.