The Effect of the Reciprocal Teaching Approach On the Reading Comprehension of Efl Students

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate whether metacognitive awareness and comprehension monitoring, as employed by reciprocal teaching involving summarization, question-generation, clarification, and prediction, helps EFL readers to comprehend texts and whether this method could be applied to both skilled and less-skilled learners. A group of 42 students was taught using the reciprocal teaching approach (RT) while the other group of 42 students were given a skill- oriented instruction (ST). Findings indicate that reciprocal teaching has a significant positive effect on EFL learners' reading. In addition, while both skilled and less-skilled learners in the RT group benefited from the reciprocal teaching method, the skill-based teaching method helped the less-skilled learners, not the skilled learners, improve their reading comprehension The RT students also reported their preference on the reciprocal teaching method.