How to Use Reciprocal Teaching to Boost ESL Reading Comprehension
Chris ParkerIf you’ve ever read a story and had trouble understanding what it was about or couldn’t recall important details afterward, then you know how it feels to struggle with reading comprehension. Luckily, there’s an approach that you can use to help your students develop these skills and it’s known as reciprocal teaching. Not only is it effective at refining reading comprehension skills, but it also increases engagement, motivation, and interest, making it a must-use approach in virtually every ESL classroom.
What is reciprocal teaching and how does it work?
Reciprocal teaching is a cognitive approach that helps to build students’ reading comprehension skills by encouraging them to focus on what they’re reading. It accomplishes this by teaching students reading strategies where they either summarize, question, clarify, or predict things related to what they’ve read as part of a group discussion.
It’s referred to as reciprocal teaching because the teacher first explains how the strategies work and models how to use them during initial discussions, while the students then carry out discussions themselves afterward by using the strategies without support. The teacher’s role is, therefore, simply as a mediator to explain how the group discussion process works and to help students understand how to analyze text using the strategies.
What learner levels will benefit from reciprocal teaching?
This approach can be effective for virtually any learner level that has basic reading comprehension skills, and research shows that even learners at a second-grade level can benefit from it. However, while it may be suitable for younger learners, it can be much more effective for older students in secondary school or beyond because it involves abstract thinking, which many younger students struggle with.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development argues that children develop abstract thinking skills in their formal operational stage. This stage typically begins when they’re 11 to 12 years old, so students who are these ages or older are likely to respond best to this approach.
The four strategies of reciprocal teaching
During group discussions, students will be asked to carry out the following strategies as part of their roles:
Summarization – a student using this strategy will give a general summary to the group of what they’ve read.
Questioning – this strategy can be used by a student to ask specific questions about the reading text.
Clarification – after a student has asked questions about the text, another will attempt to clarify their questions by answering.
Prediction – the last student, who is asked to predict, will elaborate on what they think will happen next in a story or text.
Five steps for carrying out reciprocal teaching
To carry out your first reciprocal teaching activity, you can follow these five steps in three phases (introduction, modeling, and production phases):
Introduction phase
1. Grouping and explaining the concept
Reciprocal teaching is a bit unique among cognitive teaching approaches because it’s one where you’ll explicitly describe how it works to your students beforehand. This is the first step, and you’ll explain to your students that there are different ways to analyze a text (summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting) and you’re going to show them how to do this.
You’ll then put your students into groups of four so that there’s a student available to cover each analysis strategy, and while this is ideal, you can form larger groups if necessary.
Tip: explain the concept in both L1 and L2
When possible, explain the concept of reading analysis strategies first in the student’s L1 language (their native language) or, if you have a teaching assistant who can speak the L1, ask them if they can do this for you. Then, explain it again in the L2 (English) so that there are no misunderstandings. While this isn’t necessary, research shows that explaining this concept in both languages beforehand can be quite effective.
Modeling phase
2. Read a section of the text aloud
After introducing the concept to your students, you’ll read a section of the text aloud in front of the class from your source reading material and will have students read along. It shouldn’t be too large of a section, as you’ll want your students to be able to remember important details from the text that you’ve read. However, it will need to be a large enough section where you have enough content and details to analyze.
3. Demonstrate the strategies in use
Once you’ve read the section of a text, you can now demonstrate to your students how they should carry out their roles later based on the strategies they’re given. You should model each of the four actions below, one after another:
Summarize
You should start modeling the strategies and roles by summarizing the text you read. To avoid confusing your students, use the same vocabulary words that were used in the text, meaning don’t paraphrase. Also, make sure to cite some of the text’s key details so students understand that summarizing is based on important details.
Question
You’ll then model the strategy of questioning in which you’ll ask questions aloud about the text, and this can be about anything, such as a character, an event in a story, the meaning of a vocabulary word, or even grammar used in the text.
Clarify
Next, you’ll clarify the questions by answering them yourself aloud with as many details as possible, and you should ensure that your students understand that the roles of questioning the text and clarifying are two separate roles that will be carried out later by two different students.
Predict
Lastly, using cues within the text, you’ll predict in front of the students what you think will occur in the next section of the text. The cues you use will be the details gleaned from the text, and rather than simply predicting what will happen next, you should make those cues clear to your students so they understand how you reached this prediction.
4. Rinse and repeat the previous step
After you’ve modeled all four strategies in front of the students, you’ll need to ensure that they understand the different strategies and roles. You’ll answer any questions they have about the process, and then repeat the modeling activity by reading the following section of the text with the same actions again. Do this as many times as it takes for the concept to sink in so that your students can understand what they’re expected to do.
Production phase
5. Assign roles and provide scaffolding
Once your students start understanding how the group discussion works, you’ll assign them roles based on the four strategies of summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. If you have more than four students in a group, you can assign more than one student to each role, and the roles should all be rotated so that every student gets a chance to use each strategy.
One of the students should also be assigned the role of group discussion leader, which is the role you previously filled as the teacher. This role involves reading the text and then allowing students to use the strategies to analyze it and discuss it within the group.
While this is taking place, you should be monitoring the reading and discussion so that you can offer support (teacher-to-student scaffolding) as needed, but you’ll also want to gradually remove that support by allowing knowledgeable students to start assisting others in this role.
What are the benefits of using reciprocal teaching?
If you’re not already sold on the concept of reciprocal teaching, here are some of its many benefits:
- Improves comprehension – when students are encouraged to actively analyze the texts they’re reading, this leads to better reading comprehension skills, as they’re learning the metacognitive strategies that they need to make sense of what they’re reading.
- Boosts engagement – students are more focused on what they’re reading when they’re given a purpose and a reason to read a text. This can boost their engagement and lead to improvements in both interest and motivation as well.
- Builds independence – by first supporting students in group discussions and then allowing them to carry these out on their own, reciprocal teaching helps to build students’ sense of independence.
- Utilizes peer scaffolding – one of the most effective ways to teach students a concept is to allow their peers to do this instead when it’s appropriate to do so. Students can learn different techniques for carrying out reciprocal teaching roles by first observing their peers in these roles.
- Enhances awareness – as students develop better reading skills through this approach, they will not only notice this but also become better at recognizing where improvements still need to be made.
Reciprocal teaching resources
While you can carry out this approach on your own and with your own materials, the following resources, a bookmark and a graphic organizer, can be referenced or printed out. These images can help your students when it comes to remembering how to carry out reading analysis strategies:
Always provide a comfortable learning environment
Reciprocal teaching leads to student independence, but some students may struggle to reach that level if they feel insecure about their reading abilities and are afraid of taking risks. To address this, you should always pay attention to the learning environment that you’re creating for your students. They’ll be more willing to participate and less fearful of taking risks when in a warm, comfortable environment where you show them that it’s okay to make mistakes.