What is it?
Reciprocal teaching is an instructional activity that takes the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. Reciprocal Teaching is an interactive reading strategy designed to enhance the student’s comprehension of expository text by integrating the processes of predicting, clarifying, visualizing, questioning, and summarizing during reading. These strategies may be done in any order, hence the term reciprocal. Reciprocal Teaching starts as an oral dialogue between teacher, student, and text. It moves to an automatic conversation between reader and text.
Why do it?
Students often experience frustration when trying to gain information from their
textbooks. They recognize and pronounce words but have poor reading comprehension.
Students who have been taught to practice Reciprocal Teaching strategies have
made dramatic improvement in comprehension following twenty sessions of instruction
using these strategies. Students gain confidence in their abilities to comprehend text and
show improvement in reading for information during independent reading and test taking.
Students who are proficient readers often do not like Reciprocal Teaching
because they have already internalized the strategies that good readers use most often
when they read. However, it will help the struggling students gain “concrete” methods to
help them stay focused and make meaning as they read any kind of text. Reciprocal
Teaching encourages re-reading and meta-cognition, which also lead to greater
comprehension.
How to do it?
The Reciprocal Teaching strategies are introduced to students and modeled by the
teacher in a whole-class situation. Then, as students practice these strategies, the teacher
becomes a coach who slowly withdraws support as the students are empowered to read
with increased comprehension, both in groups and independently. Research
has shown that students must practice this strategy at least 20 times before they
automatically incorporate the strategies as they read.
Reciprocal Teaching has five strategies: Predicting, Visualizing, Clarifying,
Questioning, and Summarizing. “Reciprocal” means “back and forth,” therefore these strategies may be used in any order. Until the students have internalized the strategies, however, they will practice them in a prescribed order.
PREDICTING
The most important prediction should come as students read the title or a headline. Other predictions may happen when they read chapter headings or subtitles, the author of the story asks a question, or the next thing a character might do in a story.
Where can you make predictions in a story or a chapter in a textbook?
CLARIFYING
Good readers are not always fast readers. Sometimes you have to slow down and even stop to clarify or make clear what you are reading.What do you do when you come across a word you don’t know while you are reading? What do you do when you don’t understand what the text is trying to tell you?
Clarifying for Understanding
- Look for little words inside big words.
- Look for word parts such as bases (roots), prefixes, and suffixes.
- Look for commas that follow unfamiliar words. Sometimes when a writer uses a word that may not be understood by many people, it will be explained within the context of the sentence.
- Look for the clues that the writer gives to help you figure out the words so that you can keep reading. One of the most important clues are the commas that follow unfamiliar words. That comma is a signal that the author is going to define the word in the sentence.
- Keep reading. The word that is confusing you may not be the word that gives meaning to the sentence. As you read, you may also get a general idea of the meaning, even though it would not be a dictionary definition.
Good readers visualize as they read. Sometimes they must stop to make a mental picture of what they are reading in order to comprehend what the writer is trying to communicate.
ASKING TEACHER-LIKE QUESTIONS
What makes a “good” teacher-like question? You have already asked clarifying questions about parts you don’t understand. Now you should ask questions to help you understand the larger meanings of the lesson. Teacher-Like Questions are questions that can be answered from what you have read. You must be able to find the answer in the text. Good teacher-like questions are based on the information given in the text. Students should be able to ask who, what, when, where, why, and how questions.
“What kinds of questions can you think of to test your understanding of this passage?
SUMMARIZING
A summary tells the most important ideas in one or two sentences. A good summary does not include details or information that is not important.
“From what you have said, can you come up with a definition for a summary?”
Constructive/Cognitive/Practical/Behavioral
Reciprocal Teaching is a cooperative learning instructional method. Teachers foster reciprocal teaching through their belief that collaborative construction of meaning between themselves and students leads to a higher quality of learning. Thinking aloud and discussion of thoughts help in clarification and revision of thinking and learning, therefore developing cognition. Effective reciprocal teaching lessons include scaffolding, thinking aloud, using cooperative learning, and facilitating meta-cognition with each step. Groups should include no less than four and no more than six so that all students have equal opportunity to practice strategies. Interaction may occur between teacher and student or between students, and this strategy will be effective for students who are shy, inattentive, or have other individual needs that they can develop their behavioral, cognitive, constructive, and practical skills.
It addresses to Bartlett's Schema theory that memory takes the form of schema which provide a mental framework for understanding and remembering information. Schema theory mentioned in Cognitivism/Pragmatism. It also fits into the Cognitive Flexibility theory that is under Constructivism/Interpretivism. According to the theory, "the importance of constructed knowledge is the learners must be given an opportunity to develop their own representations of information in order to properly learn". This strategy addresses to Information processing with its feautures such as: "a) students are actively processing, storing and retrieving information, and b) teaching involves helping learners to develop information processing skills and apply them systematically to mastering the curriculum. Cognitive structures relate to structure of the subject matter".
Resources:
reciprocal teaching e-book
reciprocal teaching 6-8
IDKB-Models/Theories
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