The purpose of this study was to find out the relativerneffectiveness of the tradfti.nal and c.mmunicativernapproaches to the teaching of English reading comprehensionrnin developing the reading abilities of Addis Ababa Universityrnfreshman students. An experiment, in which a samplernpopulation of one hundred and forty freshmen in six groupsrntook part, was conducted for six weeks. Three of the groupsrnformed the control group and the other three the Â· e~erimental~rnA pre-test on reading com;rehension was given tornboth the control and experimental groups to see if therernwas any significant difference between the reading abilitiesrnof the two groups. Statistical tests showed that the differencesrnwere not significant.rnTwo sets of teaching materials were prepared forrnboth groups in 'accerdance with the pedagogical principlesrnof the teaching methodologies in qu~ti .n. The controlrnclasses were taught reading comprehension in the traditionalrnapproach and the experimental classes in the~ .mmunicativernapproach. Three particirating instructors each taught onerncontrol and one experimental class respectively.rnA comprehension post-test was administered t~ bothrnthe control and experimental groups . Statistical testsrnshowed that the average post-test score of the experimentalrngroup was significantly greater than that of thecontr.lrngroup. Therefore the null hypothesis that there would notrnbe any Si~lificant difference between the comprehension posttestrnresults of the two groups attributable to the adoptionrnof the communicative approach had to be rejected. The conclusionrnwas drawn that the communicative approach is mererneffective than the traditional approach in developing thernreading abilities of freshman students at Addis AbabarnUniversity.