Scholastic Reading Hub | Teaching Reading | Comprehension | Reciprocal Reading

Reciprocal Reading

What is it?

Reciprocal reading is a method of teaching comprehension which explicitly teaches strategies for predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarising. It is an instructional reading strategy where pupils take turns to become the ‘teacher’ in their small-group reading sessions.

Reciprocal teaching has been shown to increase both reading and listening comprehension, and has demonstrated that learners transfer their learning into other contexts.

The reciprocal teaching method encourages children to ask questions of the text and to answer and build on the questions of their peers. Asking questions and peer discussion can be a powerful learning experience and requires a higher level of understanding and engagement with the text.

Speaking and listening skills are central to reciprocal reading. Speaking and listening development is crucial for creative and critical thinking. The reciprocal teaching approach gives children the opportunity to practise speaking and listening skills in a non-threatening environment.

In the implementation stage within the classroom, a teacher models the strategy with their class, and over a short period of time (between one day and one week depending on the class and materials used) starts to withdraw from leading small-group reading sessions and hands over control to the group.

It is designed to concentrate on four comprehension types:

• Predicting
• Clarifying
• Questioning
• Summarising

What does the research show?

The original reciprocal reading research was: Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension – Fostering and Comprehension Monitoring Activities, published by Palinscar & Brown, 1984 at the University of Illinois.

• Compared to control groups …pupils using reciprocal reading methods made significantly greater progress, in a very short amount of time and this … was maintained for the long term.

A Fischer Family Trust trial in Middlesbrough, with two sessions per week over one term, showed an average gain of 13 months for reading accuracy, 16 months in reading comprehension. (The control group +3 months in reading accuracy, +1 month for reading comprehension.)

In a 3-month study (GL Assessment test on 616 pupils in five schools in 2013), the average increase in children’s reading age was +9 months and +10 months for children on Free School Meals.

Five of the strategies employed in reciprocal reading appear in the top seven strategies (by months impact) in the Education Endowment Foundation toolkit, and all have low costs.

John Hattie’s research gives reciprocal teaching an effect size of 0.74, one of the highest effects in the ‘teaching’ domain.

---