Reciprocal Teaching Strategy as an Important Factor of Improving Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading Comprehension is one of the most important skills, receives the special focus in foreign language teaching. Research has suggested that explicit reading strategies can be taught to students and enhancing their reading comprehension. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension. Reciprocal teaching consists of four basic reading strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies are the reciprocal teaching strategies used to improve students’ reading comprehension This article will discuss whether ‘reciprocal teaching strategies’ improve students reading comprehension or not. This lack of good reading comprehension skills is exacerbated by the central role of reading comprehension in higher education success. One solution to this problem of poor reading comprehension skills is the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies. This paper is going to define the key words, explain the models of reading process, follow reading process and reading strategies, discuss cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies and reading comprehension, elaborate reciprocal teaching and its theoretical framework, mention the related research on reciprocal teaching, and state relationship between reciprocal teaching and reading comprehension. The findings indicated that reciprocal teaching had a significantly positive effect on the English reading comprehension and usage of the four main factors of reciprocal teaching strategies of EFL students.