Reciprocal teaching strategies and their impacts on English reading comprehension

Abstract

Whenever teachers are faced with the problem of students who do not have adequate comprehension skills, they need to be able to train those students to use metacognitive strategies; otherwise, these students will continue to read texts emphasizing only words and not meaning. One set of metacognitive strategies are the reciprocal teaching strategies used to improve students' reading comprehension. Reciprocal teaching involves four main metacognitive reading strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. The aims of this paper are to define the key terms, explain the models of reading process, review reading process and reading strategies, discuss cognitive and metacognitive strategies and reading comprehension, elaborate reciprocal teaching and its theoretical framework, mention the related research on reciprocal teaching, and state relationship between reciprocal teaching and reading comprehension. The findings indicated that reciprocal teaching had a significantly positive effect on the English reading comprehension and usage of the four main metacognitive reading strategies of EFL students. © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.