Reciprocal teaching

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional activity that takes the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. Reciprocal teaching is a reading technique which is thought to promote students' reading comprehension. A reciprocal approach provides students with four specific reading strategies that are actively and consciously used to support comprehension: Questioning, Clarifying, Summarizing, and Predicting. Palincsar (1986) believes the purpose of reciprocal teaching is to facilitate a group effort between teacher and students as well as among students in the task of bringing meaning to the text.

Reciprocal teaching is best represented as a dialogue between teachers and students in which participants take turns assuming the role of teacher. -Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar

Reciprocal teaching is most effective in the context of small-group collaborative investigation, which is maintained by the teacher or reading tutor.

The concept of reciprocal teaching was first developed by Palincsar and Brown in 1986 . As previously mentioned, reciprocal teaching was developed as a technique to help teachers bridge the gap for students who demonstrated a discrepancy between decoding skills and comprehension skills (Palincsar, Ransom, & Derber, 1989). That is, the process is aimed at aiding students who possess grade-level skills in letter-sound correspondence ("sounding out" words and "chunking"), but are unable to construct meaning from the texts they decode. Reciprocal teaching utilizes the strategy of prediction, whereby students predict before reading, and then use those predictions during reading to check if they are correct (Stricklin, 2011).

Reciprocal teaching is made up of four components: predicting, clarifying, questioning, and comprehension. In 2005, Oczkus coined the phrase the "fab four" to describe the processes involved with reciprocal teaching (Stricklin, 2011). Students then move on to clarifying things they do not understand by asking the instructor questions, or having the teacher ask questions during reading, in order to clarify difficult sections of text or point out areas where students should pay particular attention. After the text is read, questions are asked of a student or group of students to enhance retention and check how much was learned. Finally, comprehension is achieved by engaging the students in a summary of either a page or the entire text selection of what they just read (Stricklin, 2011). The teacher supports the students by rephrasing or elaborating on their answers, statements, and questions.

Reciprocal teaching is an amalgamation of reading strategies that effective readers are thought to use. As stated by Pilonieta and Medina in their article "Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades: We Can Do It, Too!", previous research conducted by Kincade and Beach (1996) indicates that proficient readers use specific comprehension strategies in their reading tasks, while poor readers do not (Pilonieta & Medina, 2009). Proficient readers have well-practiced decoding and comprehension skills which allow them to proceed through texts somewhat automatically until some sort of triggering event alerts them to a comprehension failure (Palincsar & Brown, 1984).

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