Reciprocal Teaching: Strategies, Steps, and Effectiveness

Introduction to Reciprocal Teaching

In recent times, researchers and practitioners have focused increasingly on understanding the role of metacognition in reading. This is evidenced by the work of researchers such as Brown, Palincsar, Garcia, and Pearson. Because a gap exists between teaching discrete skills and making learners conscious of the internal processes carried out through metacognition, this area of research is significant. Individual readers frequently encounter difficulty in bringing together the right strategies to achieve holistic comprehension of a text, even when they can perform distinct skills such as skimming and scanning, tolerating ambiguity, finding meaning from context, and drawing inferences. Reciprocal teaching is one technique that has been established to counteract this difficulty and to internalize the process of comprehension. (Ramaiyah, 1992)

Reciprocal teaching is an extensively investigated technique for training students to become active readers. It can be described as an instructional activity that takes place in the form of a structured dialogue between teachers and students regarding sections of text. Reciprocal teaching can be viewed both as a study skill and as an instructional approach, because it requires explicit teaching of specific procedures. (Nevin, "Reciprocal Teaching: Using Data-Based Instruction") Alvermann and Phelps, in their book Content Reading and Literacy, state that to succeed in today's diverse classroom, reciprocal teaching has two main characteristics: (1) the teaching and practice of four comprehension strategies — predicting, question generating, clarifying, and summarizing — and (2) a unique form of cognitive apprenticeship in which students gradually learn to take on the role of teacher in helping their peers build meaning from text. ("Reading Strategies Scaffolding Students' Interactions with Texts: Reciprocal Teaching")

Rosenshine and Meister suggest that reciprocal teaching is grounded in four important instructional practices: direct teaching of the strategies, as opposed to reliance exclusively on teacher questioning; student practice of reading strategies with actual reading material rather than worksheets or artificial exercises; scaffolding of instruction; and students functioning as cognitive apprentices through peer group cooperation. Reciprocal teaching involves a high level of social interaction and teamwork, as students gradually assume the role of teacher in helping their peers construct meaning from text. Essentially, reciprocal teaching is an authentic activity because learning — both inside and outside of school — develops through cooperative social interaction and the social construction of meaning. ("Reading Strategies Scaffolding Students' Interactions with Texts: Reciprocal Teaching")

Why Use Reciprocal Teaching Strategies?

Reciprocal teaching is used to facilitate a collaborative effort between teacher and students, as well as among students themselves, in the task of constructing meaning from text. ("Reciprocal Teaching," ncrel.org) It helps students actively engage with the written word, with or without the presence of a teacher. The strategies selected provide opportunities for students to learn how to monitor their own learning and thinking. ("Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Strategy") Reciprocal teaching helps to develop reading comprehension by equipping students with strategies for monitoring understanding and constructing meaning. Both teacher and students share responsibility for applying the reading strategies. The teacher initially assumes primary responsibility for teaching these strategies and gradually transfers that responsibility to the students. It is expected that every student participates in the discussion. The teacher provides assistance when needed to encourage student participation, and regularly works to shift control of the dialogues to the students. (Hartman, 1997) Reciprocal teaching also gives students a purpose for reading: to confirm or challenge their predictions. ("Reciprocal Teaching," paec.org)

Although there are many additional benefits, the primary advantage of this reading approach is that intellectual capacity is expected to increase. Even though the teacher is initially responsible for reviewing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting, students are able to observe and examine the skills modeled by an expert. This allows the teacher to demonstrate how the strategies arise naturally from the reading experience. Both cognitive and metacognitive awareness of reading comprehension are engaged by this method. Through reciprocal teaching, learners become aware of their cognitive resources and self-regulatory mechanisms, which they draw upon in their efforts to comprehend what they read. What a reader understands about the task of reading will influence how they approach planning reading activities.

Students practice four core reading strategies and compare their thinking with that of their peers. At the same time, they are listening and speaking in a genuine academic context. They employ interactive techniques that are both linguistically appropriate — such as turn-taking strategies, question formation, estimation statements, and expressions of agreement and disagreement — and socially appropriate — such as taking turns, reading body language, and sharing responsibility. During the discussion of the text, students' language needs are contextualized and clarified, and opportunities arise for using relevant vocabulary.

The reader's growing independence from the classroom teacher supports autonomy in the reading process. A video of students engaged in reciprocal teaching can provide material for studying reading skills and group dynamics. Skills gained through reciprocal teaching are transferable to texts across subject areas, and the reciprocal teaching reading group can develop naturally into a study group. The most effective way to determine whether students are learning the strategies and whether those strategies are helping them is to listen carefully to students during discussion. In whole-group settings, students may be asked to write out questions and summaries to be reviewed by the teacher or peers. ("Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Strategy")

Research has shown that students demonstrated no increase in intellectual capacity when they were taught the four reciprocal teaching strategies without being actively engaged in the process. Intellectual capacity improved only when students were vigorously involved in reciprocal teaching. (Edwards, 1995) The reciprocal teaching model is therefore appealing because of its straightforward procedure and its effectiveness in meeting its objectives. It is easy to follow, supports skills that are essential for reading successfully in English, and provides a medium for the integration of communicative activities. Its potential for multilevel and cross-disciplinary application makes it a valuable instructional tool. (Hewitt, 1995)

The Four Steps of Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal teaching consists of a set of strategies that incorporates pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading activities into four core components. Teachers model the strategies, guide students as they apply them, and monitor students' use of the strategies. (Hewitt, 1995) The four essential steps of metacognitive reading instruction through reciprocal teaching are: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting.

Summarizing provides the opportunity to identify and integrate the most important information in the text. Text can be summarized at the sentence level, at the paragraph level, and across the entire passage. When students first begin the reciprocal teaching process, their efforts typically focus on the sentence and paragraph levels. As they gain proficiency, they become capable of integrating information at the paragraph and passage levels.

Question generating reinforces the summarizing strategy and moves the learner one step further in the comprehension process. When students generate questions, they first identify the type of information that is important enough to serve as the basis for a question. They then express this information in question form and self-test to confirm that they can answer their own questions. Question generating is a flexible strategy in that students can be taught and encouraged to form questions at various levels. Some classroom contexts require students to master supporting detail information; others require students to synthesize or apply new information from the text.

Clarifying is especially important when working with students who have a history of comprehension difficulties. These students may believe that the purpose of reading is simply to decode words correctly, and may not be concerned that the words — or the passage as a whole — are not making sense. When students are asked to clarify, their attention is drawn to the fact that there may be many reasons why a text is difficult to understand, such as unfamiliar vocabulary, ambiguous reference words, and complex or unfamiliar ideas. Students are taught to be alert to the effects of such comprehension barriers and to take necessary steps to restore meaning, such as rereading or asking for help.

Predicting occurs when students hypothesize what the author will discuss next. To do this effectively, students must activate relevant background knowledge they already possess about the topic. This gives students a purpose for reading — to confirm or refute their hypothesis — and creates an opportunity to connect new knowledge encountered in the text with prior knowledge. The predicting strategy also supports the use of text structure, as students learn that headings, subheadings, and embedded questions are helpful cues for anticipating what will come next. Taken together, each of these strategies is designed to help students construct meaning from text and monitor their reading to ensure genuine comprehension. ("Reciprocal Teaching," ncrel.org)

Conclusion

Reciprocal teaching is an orderly method in which teachers and students take turns leading discussions and developing understanding about shared text. Four comprehension strategies are used: prediction, clarification, summarization, and question generation. These strategies are modeled by the teacher and then practiced by students in supportive groups. Teachers monitor the discussion and provide cognitive scaffolding. Reciprocal teaching equips students with the necessary cognitive and metacognitive strategies to understand the reading process, supporting the development of active, independent readers. It provides models of expert reading and requires interaction and responses that engage learners and reinforce comprehension through the collaborative construction of meaning. Reciprocal teaching strategies have produced measurable improvements in reading comprehension during reading lessons and have facilitated the transfer of skills to content areas across the regular classroom environment.