The Impact of Reciprocal Teaching on Reading Comprehension

Reciprocal teaching (RT) is a process involving four distinct activities (questioning, clarifying, summarizing and predicting) employed in a student- led,team approach to develop reading comprehension skills among primary students. An analysis of variance of the results indicated no detriment to the use of the RT procedures in comparison to the effective traditional approach taken by the hometeacher. Further, exit interviews with, and journal entries of students from both groups suggested that while the students in the control group viewed reading as a decoding process, the students from the RT group had begun to internalize the questioning and clarifying strategies and viewed reading as a process of dealing with ideas (comprehension).

Keywords:

reciprocal teaching , reading comprehension , reading strategies