Reciprocal Teaching as a Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy in Promoting Saudi University Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reciprocal teaching (RT) involves collaborative dialogue between the teacher and students, with the aim of jointly constructing the meaning from a shared text. This study employs RT as a cognitive and metacognitive set of strategies for enhancing students’ reading comprehension and monitoring skills. Thirty-four students were assigned to the RT group for reading instruction, whereas 30 students were assigned to the control group for regular reading instruction. The four RT strategies (predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing) empowered the students to engage in a non-linear approach to comprehend texts and monitor their reading comprehension. They afforded the students the chance to engage in pre-, during-, and post-reading cognitive and metacognitive processes, collaborate with their peers, read with intentionality and focus, and assume shared responsibility for monitoring their advancement in reading comprehension. The students engaged in the scaffolded activities of read-aloud, dialogue, structured comprehension, and peer teaching to develop their reading comprehension and monitoring skills. The results showed that the RT group outperformed the control group on the post-test in both total score of reading comprehension and individual reading skills. Therefore, language instructors are recommended to use an array of effective RT strategies to enhance their students’ reading comprehension and monitoring skills.

Keywords

• reciprocal teaching
• predicting
• questioning
• clarifying
• summarizing