by Mieder van Loggerenberg
Reciprocal teaching is an instructional application or metacognitive strategy of Vygotsky where students take on the role as a teacher and lead the discussion during a reading session. The objective is to improve students' ability to learn from text. Reciprocal Teaching involves four strategies that guide the discussion: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting.
Why use reciprocal teaching?
· It assists students’ comprehension and to be actively involved as they read.
· It encourages students to ask questions to increase comprehension during reading.
· It helps to develop student’s thought process while reading.
· It encourages discussions and participation.
· Students are more engaged, and the focus is student-centered.
How to use reciprocal teaching
Step 1:
Teach students the Fab 4 learning strategies: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting.
Step 2:
Divide the students into groups of 4. Assign them roles of the Fab 4, one for each strategy. Meaning one will take on the role as the questioner asking questions, another the clarifier, and so on and so forth.
Step 3:
Have students read a few paragraphs of the text while the rest take notes by underlining words or sentences that are unclear, or difficult to read. Those taking on the role as summarizers will highlight all the key points from the passage.
Step 4:
Students then either ask the teacher to explain the words or sentences they don’t understand or can’t pronounce, or the teachers allocates a few minutes to let the students find the meanings or translations. The teacher plays the role of the facilitator and only intervenes when students get stuck.
Step 5:
The questioner will then pose questions about any unclear parts, confusing information, and how this topic is related to concepts they have already learned. Readers can monitor and asses their understanding and ask themselves questions. This internal thought process is termed as metacognition or inner speech. In addition, generating questions can be used as a self-test for the reader. Questioning provides a context for exploring the text more deeply and assuring the construction of meaning (Doolittle, Hicks, Triplett, Nichols, & Young, 2006)
Acknowledging you don’t understand something plays a vital part of the learning process. It is also important to allow students enough time to pause and write down the questions and explain why some information or questions are more important. As teachers we need to understand that regardless of students age or proficiency level forming questions can be difficult. So, it is important to start off with the easier questions like:
· Who?
· What?
· When?
· Where?
· Why?
· How?
Step 6:
The clarifier will then try to answer all those questions. Encourage students to add any additional information if they feel the answers needed more substance. The clarification strategy can also help identify which topics, vocabulary or concepts are misunderstood or difficult to remember and so offers the opportunity to further discuss and elaborate on this or implement chunking techniques to help absorb the material more effectively.
Step 7:
The summarizer will then read the key points of the passage and then paraphrase it. Summarization is vital to the process since it requires the reader to perform the task of discriminating between important and less-important information in the text. It must then be organized into a coherent whole (Palincsar & Brown, 1984).
Step 8:
The predictor must then offer a prediction on what will happen or what topic will be discussed next based on their own background knowledge and the text they have covered. The purpose is for students to create hypotheses related to the text and the authors intent in writing. The predictions do not need to be accurate but needs to be clear.
Step 9:
The roles in the group are then switched and the whole process is repeated for the next passage until the entire selected text is covered.
Current Use
Currently in the US, research has also been conducted on the use of reciprocal teaching in primary grades. Pilonieta and Medina conducted a series of procedures to implement their version of reciprocal teaching in elementary school students (2009). The researchers adopted an age-appropriate model for reciprocal teaching and called it "Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades," or RTPG (2009). Their research shows that even in younger children, reciprocal teaching benefited the students and they showed increased retention of the RTPG when re-tested 6 months later (2009).
Reciprocal teaching has been heralded as effective in helping students improve their reading ability in pre-post trials or research studies (Pearson & Doyle, 1987; Pressley et al., 1987) Further trials employing Reciprocal Teaching have consistently indicated the technique promotes reading comprehension as measured on standardized reading tests (Carter, 1997).
Conclusion
Reciprocal teaching is just one of many reading or studying techniques to make the learning process more effective. The reciprocal teaching model has been in use for 20 years (Williams, 2011) and has been adopted by a number of school districts and reading intervention programs across the United States and Canada. So, regardless of the subject your students are learning, when language comprehension is required, reciprocal teaching is an effective way of helping them to have a deeper understanding of the content. By implementing the appropriate learning techniques, we can help students with the learning process and improve their reading abilities.
Useful Links:
Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal Teaching: Why, How, & Examples
Research that supports this strategy
· Pilonieta, Paola; Medina, Adriana L. (2009). "Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades: "We Can Do It Too!"". The Reading Teacher. 63 (2): 120–129.
· Yu-Fen, Yang (2010). "Developing a reciprocal teaching/learning system for college remedial reading instruction". Computers and Education. 55: 1193–1201.
· Williams, Joan (2010). "Taking on the Role of Questioner: Revisiting Reciprocal Teaching". The Reading Teacher. 64 (4): 278–281.
· Mayer, R.E. (1996). Learning Strategies for Making Sense out of Expository Text: The SOI Model for Guiding Three Cognitive Processes in Knowledge Construction. Educational Psychology Review 8(4) 357-371.
· Oczuks, L. (2003). Reciprocal teaching at work: Strategies for improving reading comprehension. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
· Palincsar, A. S. & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension Monitoring Activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), pp. 117-175.
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