The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategy instruction on the reading comprehension ability of middle school students. 132 middle school students participated in this study. TOEIC assessment and reading strategy questionnaires were used to collect the data. For the data analysis, independent samples t-tests, paired t-tests, and ANOVA were used. The results of this study demonstrate the effect of the explicit instruction of cognitive reading strategies (grouping, inferencing, and deduction) and metacognitive reading strategies (advance organization, selective attention, and organizational planning) on middle school students` reading comprehension and their use of reading strategies. The specific findings of this study are as follows: 1) Statistically, the post-test reading comprehension score of the experimental group was higher than that of the control group. 2) The use of reading strategies showed a post-intervention increase; the use of cognitive and compensation strategies increased significantly, whereas no significant increase was noted in using metacognitive strategies. 3) There was no gender-related effect on the behavior of using reading strategies although both female and male students showed a significant increase in the use of compensation strategies.