The objective of this research is to compare the English reading comprehension and motivation to read of seventh grade Thai students taught with applied instruction through the genre-based approach and teachers' manual. A randomized pre-test post-test control group design was used through the cluster random sampling technique. The data were analyzed by basic statistics, the t-test for independent samples and the t-test for dependent samples. The experimental group students taught with applied instruction through the genre-based approach showed significantly higher scores in reading comprehension of and motivation to read English than those in the control group taught by methods according to the teacher's manual at a 0.05 confidence level.