Reciprocal teaching: Effects on EFL students’ reading comprehension and challenges

Pages: 92-97
Berhanu Asress (Faculty of Humanities, Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia, East Africa)

This study investigated the effects of reciprocal teaching (using its basic reading strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying & summarizing) on EFL students’ reading comprehension and the challenges that EFL teacher and students face during the intervention in a large class. Fifty-six grade 9 EFL students (intact group selected from ten sections using a lottery) at Bahir Dar City, Ethiopia, took the intervention for eight weeks. The reciprocal teaching instruction was delivered by the researcher in a whole class setting. Eight expository texts representing a range of topics which were selected from Grade 9 student textbook currently in use but were independent of the topics that have been covered earlier by their classroom teacher have been used for the intervention. The participants took pre-test and post-test measures of reading comprehension passage. Paired samples t-test was used to compare group means of the two scores obtained (i.e., before-after intervention means). The results indicated that there was statistically a significant difference in students’ reading comprehension after the reciprocal teaching intervention.

Keywords: reciprocal teaching, reading comprehension, modeling, guided practice