Reciprocal teaching: strategies and implementation in classroom learning

Reciprocal Teaching

In recent times, researchers and practitioners are focusing more and more in understanding the role of meta-cognition in reading. This is evidenced by the opinions proposed by researchers like Brown and Palinscar and Gracia and Pearson. As there exists dissimilarity between teachings of distinct expertise and making learners conscious of the inner processes that are carried on in the mind through meta-cognition, this field of research is significant on the whole. Individual readers, more frequently, encounter trouble in gathering together the right tactics to acquire holistic comprehension of text even though they may be able to carry out distinct abilities such as skimming and scanning, tolerating ambiguity, finding meanings from context and drawing inferences. Reciprocal Teaching is one technique that has established to counteract this trouble and internalize the process of comprehension. (Ramaiyah, 1992)

What is Reciprocal teaching?

For training students to develop into active readers, reciprocal teaching is an extensively investigated technique. Reciprocal teaching can be explained as an instructional activity that happens in the mode of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding sections of text. Reciprocal Teaching can be viewed as a study skill and also as an approach because it needs unambiguous teaching of the procedures. (Reciprocal Teaching: Using Data-Based Instruction to Improve the Learning Outcomes of Students Who are Difficult to Teach) Alverman and Phelps in their book titled "Content Reading and Literacy" states that to thrive in contemporary diverse classroom, reciprocal teaching has two main characteristics, namely, teaching and performing of the four comprehension strategies of predicting, question generating, clarifying, and summarizing and a unique variety of cognitive apprenticeship where students steadily learn to take up the function of teacher in serving their friends build meaning from text. (Reading Strategies Scaffolding Students Interactions with Texts: Reciprocal Teaching)

Rosenshine & Meister suggest that reciprocal teaching is embedded with four important instructional practices: Direct teaching of the techniques, as opposed to dependence based exclusively on teacher questioning; student practice of reading techniques with correct reading, not with worksheets or manufactured exercises; Scaffolding of teaching; students as cognitive trainee and peer group co-operation for learning. Reciprocal teaching engages a high level of social communication and teamwork, as students steadily learn to take up the function of teacher in assisting their companions build meaning from text. Essentially, reciprocal teaching is a genuine activity because learning, both inside and outside of school, progresses through cooperative social interaction and the social formation of comprehension. (Reading Strategies Scaffolding Students Interactions with Texts: Reciprocal Teaching)

2 - Why use Reciprocal Teaching strategies?

Reciprocal teaching is used to aid a group attempt between teacher and students as well as among students in the job of fetching meaning to the text. (Reciprocal Teaching: www.ncrel.org) It helps students in keenly conveying meaning to the written word, with or without the presence of teacher. The plans selected offer chances for the students to understand how to check their own learning and thinking. (Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Strategy) Reciprocal teaching helps to develop reading comprehension by furnishing students with plans for checking conception and to construct meaning; and teacher and students reveal responsibility for getting the reading plans. The teacher slowly transfers the responsibility to the students after primarily assuming main responsibility for teaching these plans. It is supposed that every student must take part in the debate. The teacher offers help when required to encourage student contribution; and the teacher frequently tries to change control of the dialogues over to students. (Hartman, 1997) Reciprocal teaching also assists to give students an objective for reading: to substantiate or challenge their predictions. (Reciprocal Teaching: www.paec.org/curriculum)

Though there are a number of other benefits, the main advantage of this reading plan is that intellectual capacity is expected to rise. Though originally the teacher is responsible for reviewing, inquiring, elucidating and forecasting, students are able to examine and probe the skills presented by a specialist. This lets the teacher to clarify how the skills begin in the reading experience. Both cognitive and meta-cognitive consciousness of reading comprehension is applied by this method. By reciprocal teaching, beginners become conscious of their cognitive resources and their self-regulatory mechanism, which they use in their hard work to understand what they require. What a booklover knows about the job of reading will effect how s/he sets about scheming reading actions. Students follow four basic reading abilities and check their thoughts with those of their colleagues. At the same time, they are paying heed and talking in English in a genuine academic situation. They make use of interactive methods that are linguistically apt like disrupting strategies, question formation, estimation statements, and agreement/disagreement expressions and socially apt like taking turns, decoding body language, and sharing responsibility. During the debate of the text, students' languages requirements are contextualized and elucidated and chances exist for using related vocabulary.

The reader's liberty from the classroom teacher supports independence in the reading procedure. A video of students occupied in reciprocal teaching gives information for the study of reading abilities and group dynamics. Talents are moveable to the reading of texts across the subject. The reciprocal teaching reading group grows into a natural study group. The most helpful method for finding out that whether students are studying the plans or not and whether or not the plans are serving them is to pay attention to students during the conversation. In entire group settings, students may be expected to write out questions and reviews to be verified by the teacher or other students. (Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Strategy) As per a research, the students revealed no increase in intellectual capacity when they were trained the four reciprocal teaching plans without being enthusiastically absorbed in the process. Intellectual capacity enhanced only when students were vigorously occupied in reciprocal teaching. (Edwards, 1995) Hence the reciprocal teaching model is appealing due to its ease of procedure and efficient in achieving its objectives. Reciprocal teaching is simple to follow, supports talents that are essential for reading lucratively in English, and offers a medium for the addition of communicative actions. This model is made a precious teaching means due to its ability for multilevel and cross-discipline application. (Hewitt, 1995)

3 - Discuss each of the steps involved in Reciprocal Teaching

From what we have learnt, reciprocal teaching is a set of plans, which includes the pre-reading, during reading and post-reading plans into its four constituents. Teachers mold the plans, lead students while they apply and check the students for choice in applying the strategies. (Hewitt, 1995) Summarizing, question generating, clarifying and predicting are the four solid steps of reciprocal teaching. Summarizing gives the chance to recognize and incorporate the most vital information in the text. Text can be summed up over sentences, over paragraphs, and over the passage entirely. The attempts of the students are usually concentrated on the sentence and at the paragraph levels, when they first begin the reciprocal teaching process. Once they gain proficiency they are able to incorporate at the paragraph and passage levels. Question generating strengthens the shortening plan and carries the learner one more step along in the comprehension action. When students make questions, they first make out the kind of data that is important enough to offer the substance for a question. They then create this data in question form and self-examine them to make sure that they can really answer their own question. (Reciprocal Teaching: www.ncrel.org)

Question generating is an accommodating plan to the level that students can be trained and motivated to create questions at many stages. For instance, some school conditions want the students to master supporting detail information; others want the students to be capable of gathering or make use of new information from text. Clarifying is an action that is mainly essential when dealing with students who have a record of comprehension trouble. These students may think that the reason of reading is speaking the words properly; they may not be mainly uneasy that the words, and in fact the passage, are not making sense. When the students are expected to explain, their interest is called to the fact that there may be many reasons why text is complicated to know, like for instance new vocabulary, vague reference words, and strange and perhaps complex ideas. (Reciprocal Teaching: www.ncrel.org)

Students are educated to be attentive to the results of such obstructions to comprehension and to take the requisite steps to bring back meaning, which includes instances such as reread, ask for help. Predicting takes place when students theorize what the author will talk about after that in the text. Students must stimulate the related background knowledge that they already have regarding this topic to do this efficiently. The students have a reason for reading: to verify or refute their theory. Additionally, the chance has been given for the students to relate the new knowledge they will come across in the text with the knowledge they already have. The expecting plan also helps in the use of text structure as students learn that headings, subheadings, and questions imbedded in the text are helpful ways of expecting what will happen next. Summing up, each of these plans was chosen as a way of helping students to form meaning from text as well as a ways to check their reading to make sure that they are in fact appreciating what they read. (Reciprocal Teaching: www.ncrel.org)

4 - Explain how this technique is effective?

The teacher takes the primary role in leading dialogues and executing the plans during the first stage of instruction. By representations, the teacher shows how to make use of the plans while reading the text. At the time of guided practice, the teacher encourages students by regulating the needs of the task based on the student's level of aptitude. In due course, the students discover to perform the dialogues with little or no teacher support. The teacher takes the role of a coach/facilitator by giving students with evaluative data on their presentation and setting them to higher levels of involvement. (Reciprocal Teaching: Preferred Practices) It is advantageous to spend a great amount of time on each plan while presenting reciprocal teaching to students. Assigning one day to each plan, with actions, gives students an exact value of each one. It is better to give them a quiz, after teaching the four plans of reciprocal teaching. They must be asked to recognize them and give an instance for each on a paper. (Edwards, 1995)

The vigorous reader can choose any one or all of these steps based on the text being read. Order is not essential. The final aim is for students to internalize the steps so they can be used when studying any subject area material. For instance, when students learn reciprocal teaching in their reading class, teachers can train them to make use of this method in reading their social studies or science texts. (Reciprocal Teaching: Using Data-Based Instruction to Improve the Learning Outcomes of Students Who are Difficult to Teach) The conditions for choosing materials depend on the students' reading and comprehension altitude, but it is also essential to make use of materials that are adequately demanding. Then it is essential to include text that is illustrative of the kinds of materials students are expected to read in their class. In expository or informational text, reciprocal teaching works well but the story structure in narrative text can work even well. Students can make use of the four steps including the elements of story grammar like setting, characters, plot, conflict, and solution. They can work in small assorted groups of three or four to make sure that each student has the chance to perform using the plans while getting opinion, when students are well-trained in the Reciprocal Teaching strategy. Recurrent guided practice is necessary in assisting students to become experts in their use of the plan. (Reciprocal Teaching: Preferred Practices)

The most valuable method for finding out if or not the students are learning the plans and if the plans are of use them is to pay attention to the students during the conversation. In full group settings, students may be asked to write out questions and reviews to be verified by the teacher or other students. Incessant checking and assessment of performance must be done to find if the kind of encouragement or scaffolding the students require to efficiently implement the plans. But, checking may become rarer when students become more proficient at checking their own performance. Teachers aspiring to implement the Reciprocal Teaching technique into their syllabus should have the summary given with full graphic organizers of the questioning, summarizing, clarifying and predicting strategies. Some consideration must be made about the text to supply for educational reasons at the time of the learning stage. The talent level of the students should be taken into account before selecting a challenging text. As students are scaffolding at different rates, a daily journal would be useful to check. Also, at least another other teacher to team up with and debrief sporadically would be very useful. (Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Strategy)

Also for very deep informational text, student groups can be given a paragraph each rather than a whole chapter and then use the Jigsaw method for information sharing. The plan can be used for reading an author's biography as a pre- reading activity in language arts classes. The teacher can stroll around the room eavesdropping in and writing down good questions, words, or problems to explain and then guide a whole-class debriefing, when the groups work. (Reciprocal Teaching: Preferred Practices) By modeling activities, the teacher explains students what expert readers do when they understand and remember text. In addition, remark of teacher modeling assists learner's work out a theoretical model of the intended job before trying to implement it. Collins et. al. dispute that, a theoretical model is essential to a beginner trying complex skills for it gives him/her with: firstly, an superior organizer; secondly, an understandable structure for making logic of the comment, suggestion, and alteration from the master and thirdly, an internalized guide for the period of relatively independent practice. Instruction is first given by the teacher and then by the peers all through the four activities of reciprocal teaching. (Ramaiyah, 1992)

Instruction facilitates a beginner to work out his/her problems and achieve his/her aims, which would not be feasible without help. This takes care of a condition, which would otherwise be humiliating for a feeble, timid or reserved beginner. From the beginning the student is conscious of the implied agreement drawn between him, his teacher and peers, that assistance would be given and that he is expected to respond when others are in need. The final phase of' Reciprocal Teaching wants the student to take the role of teacher and the teacher to weaken into the background. The student teacher must not only form and check but will also have to assess questions, summaries, and predictions other students have prepared/formulated. By becoming reviewers as well as makers students are made to speak about their knowledge of what makes a good question, prediction and summary. By civilizing a significant feature of their meta-cognitive skills, this knowledge becomes more eagerly available for application to their own summaries and questions. This knowledge can no longer be in implicit form once it is expressed. It becomes more accessible for doing various jobs, that is, it is set free from its relative binding, and can be used in many different situations. (Ramaiyah, 1992)

Anne Marie Sullivan and Brown of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory carried out a study for five years to assess the efficiency of reciprocal teaching. The research was carried out both by adult tutors and Chapter 1 teachers. The mature teachers worked with middle school students in twosome and the Chapter 1 teachers worked with middle school students working in groups at the rate of five students in a group. The students taking part in the study were classified as rather tolerable interpreters but rather meager at understanding, working at least two years below their grade level on standardized measures of comprehension. Researchers carried out their study over the course of 20 successive days of school where they assessed efficiency by having the students read passages of about 450 to 500 words after which they would answer 10 comprehension questions which they were made to remember. (What is Reciprocal Teaching?)

Before including reciprocal teaching plans the students completed five of these reading and remembering sessions. Once reciprocal teaching was included the students performed 1 read and remembered session a day. Once research was finished the students performance was evaluated and research pointed out that all but one of the students attained criterion performance, which was evaluated as 70% accuracy for four out of the five consecutive days. Not only did test percentages show an enhancement but also the experimental students showed qualitative changes such as working more freely, summary writing enhanced and the students were more able to foretell the type of questions the teacher and his or her tests would ask, as against to the controlled group of students, where none of them got criterion performance. Also teachers found lesser behavioral problems from students concerned in reciprocal teaching groups. (What is Reciprocal Teaching?)

5 - Can this technique be used in all curriculum area?

Any job that requires reading comprehension like reading to get information from a science text, social studies text, encyclopedia, reciprocal teaching can be used. (Reciprocal Teaching: Using Data-Based Instruction to Improve the Learning Outcomes of Students Who are Difficult to Teach) As science students usually work in joint groups, reciprocal teaching easily adapts into the science syllabus. If a curricular unit is chosen, it does not take much time to find well-suited reading material and to split it into passages of about 100 words. When it is their side to be teachers, students really like reciprocal teaching and feel very significant. (Edwards, 1995) When students study many methods to inquire, imagine, sum up, and forecast as they read, they internalize skills they can make use to reach new reading situations in a social studies classroom. They start asking questions about the sense of a political cartoon showing many Asian countries as dominoes. They start imagining the consequences of the Vietnam War as they read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. They study the significance of shortening a speech by President Johnson. (Davis, 2000)