خلاصة:
This study investigated the effect of reciprocal teaching (RT) on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Fifty intermediate learners participated in the study and were sampled as the experimental (n = 25) and control groups (n = 25). Participants were male and ranged in age from 15 to 16. The Reading section of Key English Test (KET, 2010) was used as the pretest to assess the participants’ entry-level reading ability. MANOVA results for comparing the 2 groups’ mean scores in the pretest were not significant, indicating that they were at the same level of reading ability prior to the study. RT strategies (i.e., predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing) were taught to the experimental group in reading classes for 6 months. Meanwhile, the control group received conventional reading instruction (i.e, prereading, while-reading, and postreading procedure). The Reading section of KET was used as the posttest to explore the improvement of both groups after the experiment. MANOVA results revealed a significant difference between the general reading ability of the experimental and control groups, in favor of the experimental group at the end of the course [F(5, 44)= 55.740, p = .000; Wilks’ Lambda = .136; partial eta squared = .864]. Moreover, examining Tests of Between-Subjects Effects revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in all 5 parts of the posttest.
ملخص الجهاز:
Because learning is the natural byproduct of reading (Pearson, 2011), "extensive exposure to linguistically comprehensible written texts can enhance the process of language acquisition" (Richards & Renandya, 2002, p.
Different studies have been carried out to show the effectiveness of using reading strategies in language classes (Anjomshoaa & Golestan, 2012; Fung, Wiklinson, & Moore; 2003; Shokrpour & Fotovatian, 2007, 2009; Yousefvand & Lotfi, 2011; Yang, 2010), but few tried to examine the effectiveness of RT strategies on EFL learners’ reading comprehension, especially high-school students.
RT focuses not only on comprehending the text the students are reading, but also preparing them to apply all the strategies they are now acquiring in future reading tasks in a self-regulated manner (Doolittle, Hicks, Triplett, Nichols, & Young, 2006) and, thus, aims at developing their cognitive and metacognitive skills.
Explicit reading strategy instruction is beneficial for both learners and teachers because it promotes learners’ autonomy and helps teachers motivate their students to actively participate in the process of learning and, thus, increases learning efficiency (Janzen & Stoller, 1998).
Drawing on the findings of research on the effectiveness of these techniques on reading comprehension and theories of cognition and metacognition, Palincsar and Brown (1984) formulated RT to foster readers’ self-verbalization and metacognition, to enable them to construct meaning from the written word (Carter, 2001), and to improve the reading skills of the students who had problems with understanding texts.
g. , Alfassi, 2004; Chen, 2005; Freihat & Al-Makhzoomi, 2012), and indicate that combined strategy instruction is an effective and useful way for improving EFL learners’ reading ability.