Developing reading strategies through small-group interaction

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of an interactive reading procedure which focused learners' attention on the active strategies they can use in order to both monitor and promote comprehension. The procedure investigated - "reciprocal teaching" - was developed by Palincsar and Brown (1984) for use with students reading texts in their first language (L1). Reciprocal teaching involves training in and use of four strategies - clarifying, identifying the main idea, summarising and predicting. In reciprocal teaching the teacher and students engage in dialogue concerning a text. The daily text, therefore, becomes a means towards the end of acquiring and refining strategies which can be activated to promote understanding of any text. The subjects in the present study were eight adult second language (L2) learners preparing for English medium university study. The experimental design enabled the collection of both process and product data for the experimental group, and product data on a matched group of students exposed to an alternative programme. Data were collected over a period of twenty consecutive teaching days for sessions of approximately one hour daily. It was predicted that reciprocal teaching would benefit L2 students by firstly assisting them to locate the source of their difficulty in reading a given text; secondly, by raising awareness of reading strategies; thirdly, by providing overt modelling of the strategies, and fourthly, by giving learners the opportunity to interact with each other in the second language. The results of the four week programme showed that the subjects improved their performance on the criterion test of reading comprehension ability. It was not clear, however, that the reciprocal teaching intervention was responsible for their improved performance, as members of the comparison group made comparable gains. Process data, however, showed that subjects in the reciprocal teaching group gained considerable practice and expertise with the strategies and learned to use them to solve problems in the texts. This was reflected in the kind of discussion occurring on each day of the study. The subjects exploited the clarification strategy principally for the explanation of difficult vocabulary. Strategies for locating the main idea of a segment of text developed in idiosyncratic ways. Subjects improved in their ability to produce acceptable summaries. The number and variety of predictions generated by the experimental subjects increased steadily over the twenty days of intervention. The instruction which accompanied reciprocal teaching initiated the subjects into the significance of the strategies selected. While it was no easy task, the study showed that it was possible to guide the subjects into grasping the benefits of the reciprocal teaching approach to reading. The teacher's efforts to continually adjust the amount and kind of assistance provided were rewarded on those occasions when students were enabled to learn in a way that extended beyond specific texts, to understanding basic principles of the reading process.