Modified Reciprocal Teaching in a Regular Classroom

This study was designed to increase reading comprehension and academic achievement of students through the use of a modified reciprocal teaching program. Modified reciprocal teaching involved small groups of students working together to read and comprehend a portion of text. The students took turns “teaching” these groups by assisting the rest of the group in selecting key words and phrases, summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. Students were randomly assigned to one of three seventh-grade regular education social studies classes. One class used modified reciprocal teaching twice a week for 8 weeks. The other two classes received a traditional instructional program. All classes were taught by the same teacher. Significant differences included higher scores on comprehension tests and writing samples, improvement in second-quarter social studies grades, and better conduct records for students who participated in modified reciprocal teaching. Several explanations for the superior performance of the modified reciprocal teaching group are hypothesized.     

Reciprocal and Transmission Models of Teaching in E2L with Young Learners

An activity‐oriented approach to learning has frequently been advocated for teaching young learners. Hardly any studies have considered how this approach affects second language learning. Through a longitudinal study, a methods experiment was conducted with 156 5‐year‐old children from one large Maltese school. The effects of a reciprocal model (exemplified through an activity‐oriented approach) were compared with a transmission model of teaching (exemplified through a skills‐oriented approach) on the learning of English as a second language when introduced to young children. Multiple analyses of variance were used to analyse the effects of sex, age, teacher training and occasions of testing on five developing language skills: receptive vocabulary (assessed using British Picture Vocabulary Scales); receptive language (sentence comprehension test); reading accuracy and comprehension (Macmillan's Individual Reading Analysis); recall of information; sentence length (The Bus Story) and accuracy of word‐reading (The Keywords Reading List). The pattern of results obtained is discussed along with implications for classroom practices.     

An evaluation of two approaches for teaching reading comprehension strategies in the primary years using science information texts

There are few research studies on the effects of teaching comprehension strategies to young children in the primary grades. Using a Dominant–Less Dominant Mixed Model design employing both qualitative and quantitative data collection, we evaluated two approaches for teaching comprehension strategies to 7- and 8-year-old children in four second-grade classrooms using science information texts. The first approach focused upon explicitly teaching a series of single comprehension strategies, one-at-a-time (SSI). The second approach focused on teaching a “set” or “family” of transacted comprehension strategies within a collaborative, interactive and engaging routine (TSI). Results showed no difference between teaching young children a “set” of comprehension strategies and teaching comprehension strategies explicitly, one-at-a-time on their reading comprehension performance as measured by a standardized test of reading comprehension, recall of main ideas from reading two 200 word passages from information texts, a reading motivation survey and a strategy use survey. Results showed significant differences between students taught a set of comprehension strategies on measures of elaborated knowledge acquisition from reading science books (detail idea units recalled), retention of science content knowledge, and significantly improved criterion or curriculum-based reading comprehension test scores. These benefits favoring TSI over SSI are important because the learning curve is relatively steep for teachers to develop the ability to teach and for young children to develop the ability to coordinate a “set” of transacted comprehension strategies.     

Effects of reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension of low‐achieving adolescents. The importance of specific teacher skills

Low‐achieving adolescents are known to have difficulties with reading comprehension. This article discusses how reciprocal teaching can improve low‐achieving adolescents' reading comprehension in whole‐classroom settings (as opposed to small‐group settings) and to what extent intervention effects are dependent on teacher behaviour. Over the course of 1 year, experimental teachers (n = 10) were given extensive training and coaching aimed at using principles of reciprocal teaching, while control teachers (n = 10) used their regular teaching method. Observations of teacher behaviour were focused on instruction of reading strategies, modelling and support of group work and were performed in both experimental and control classes, comprising a total of 369 students (mean age = 13.01). Our study shows that reciprocal teaching contributed to adolescent low achievers' reading comprehension only when experimental teachers provided high‐quality strategy instruction. In addition, results suggest that the quality of implementation of reciprocal teaching in whole‐classroom settings should receive more research attention.

Highlights

What is already known about this topic

• Reciprocal teaching is a method of instructing and guiding learners in reading comprehension.
• It consists of a set of three related instructional principles: (a) teaching comprehension‐fostering reading strategies; (b) expert modelling, scaffolding and fading; and (c) students practising and discussing reading strategies with other students, guided and coached by the teacher.
• High quality of implementation of reciprocal teaching by teachers in classrooms is difficult.

What this paper adds

• After 1 year of implementing reciprocal teaching, no main effects of the treatment were established.
• Intervention effects were moderated by quality of instruction: strategy instruction led to higher scores on reading comprehension in the treatment condition but not in the control condition.
• Implementation of the instructional principles was by no means optimal: teachers were unable to provide detailed guidance to students working in small groups and modelling of strategies requires more experience and theoretical insight in the use and nature of reading strategies.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• Extensive training and coaching are needed for teachers to become experts in reciprocal teaching.
• Teachers need hands‐on tools to be able to guide students in their collaborative group work and to fade the teachers' role in order to allow more individual self‐regulation by students in their use of strategies.
• Implementation quality has to be taken into account when doing effectiveness research and when adopting new, theory‐based didactic approaches.

     

Examining the prediction of reading comprehension on different multiple‐choice tests

In this study, 180 Norwegian fifth‐grade students with a mean age of 10.5 years were administered measures of word recognition skills, strategic text processing, reading motivation and working memory. Six months later, the same students were given three different multiple‐choice reading comprehension measures. Based on three forced‐order hierarchical multiple regression analyses, results indicated that the unique contribution of measured skills and processes to performance varied across comprehension tests. In particular, when the test consisted of a longer passage, contained a larger proportion of inferential questions and was answered without access to relevant text passages, the relative importance of word recognition skills seemed to be reduced while working memory emerged as a relatively strong, unique positive predictor of comprehension performance. These findings have important practical implications for the assessment of reading comprehension.     

Beyond phonological skills: broader language skills contribute to the development of reading

This paper reports a study that followed the development of reading skills in 72 children from the age of 8.5 to 13 years. Each child was administered tests of reading, oral language, phonological skills and nonverbal ability at time 1 and their performance on tests of reading comprehension, word recognition, nonword decoding and exception word reading was assessed at time 2. In addition to phonological skills, three measures of non‐phonological oral language tapping vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension were unique concurrent predictors of both reading comprehension and word recognition at time 1. Importantly, all three measures of oral language skill also contributed unique variance to individual differences in reading comprehension, word recognition and exception word reading four and a half years later, even when the autoregressive effects of early reading skill were controlled. Moreover, the extent to which a child's word recognition departed from the level predicted from their decoding ability correlated with their oral language skills. These findings suggest that children's oral language proficiency, as well as their phonological skills, influences the course of reading development.     

The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering the reading literacy of students with intellectual disabilities

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of strategy instruction on the reading literacy of students with mild and moderate intellectual disability. Students aged 15–21 with intellectual disability (n=35) participated in 24 sessions of literacy strategy instruction (experimental condition) or remedial literacy‐skill acquisition‐ lessons (control condition). The main objective of strategy instruction was to foster comprehension monitoring. Through shared dialogues, students were trained to generate questions about text, to summarise what was read, to clarify difficult words and to make predictions. The strategies were taught using the reciprocal teaching method developed by Palincsar and Brown. This method involves provision of support adjusted to students’ difficulties and peer teaching of strategies. Control subjects were exposed to direct instruction of basic reading skills that were presented sequentially and practiced solitarily by the students. Opportunities were given to respond to questions and to summarise but no strategy instruction was provided to foster comprehension monitoring. Two different measures of comprehension and a measure of strategy use were administered to test for variation across different methods of instruction. Findings on all measures provide support for the claim that strategy instruction is indeed superior to traditional remedial methods of skill acquisition in fostering reading literacy comprehension. These findings challenge the common perception that literacy is an organic impossibility for people defined as intellectually disabled. Moreover, the results add to recent research in sociocognitive instruction that supports the need to modify prevailing methods of reading curriculum and suggests a reconceptualisation of the comprehension process and its instruction to students with intellectual disabilities.     

Longitudinal Stability of Reading-Related Skills and Their Prediction of Reading Development

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension for 324 children at a mean age of 16 were predicted from their reading-related skills (phoneme awareness, phonological decoding, rapid naming, and IQ) at a mean age of 10 years, after controlling the predictors for the autoregressive effects of the correlated reading skills. There were significant and longitudinally stable individual differences for all four reading-related skills that were independent from each of the reading and spelling skills. Yet the only significant longitudinal prediction of reading skills was from IQ at mean age 10 for reading comprehension at mean age 16. The extremely high longitudinal latent-trait stability correlations for individual differences in word recognition (.98) and spelling (.95) left little independent outcome variance that could be predicted by the reading-related skills. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of these results and why they differ from studies of younger children.     

Improving students' reading comprehension skills: Effects of strategy instruction and reciprocal teaching

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of three different forms of strategy instruction on 210 elementary-school students' reading comprehension. Students were assigned to any one of three intervention conditions or to a traditional instruction condition (control condition). Training students were taught four reading strategies (summarizing, questioning, clarifying, predicting) and practiced these strategies in small groups (reciprocal teaching), pairs, or instructor-guided small groups. At both the post- and follow-up test the intervention students attained higher scores on an experimenter-developed task of reading comprehension and strategy use than the control students who received traditional instruction. Furthermore, students who practiced reciprocal teaching in small groups outperformed students in instructor-guided and traditional instruction groups on a standardized reading comprehension test.     

Reading Intervention for Poor Readers at the Transition to Secondary School

This study evaluated two 20-week reading interventions for pupils entering secondary school with reading difficulties. The interventions were delivered by trained teaching assistants (three 35-min sessions per week). 287 pupils (ages 11–13) from 27 schools were randomly allocated to three groups: reading intervention (targeting word recognition and decoding skills), reading intervention plus comprehension, or a waiting list control group. Neither intervention produced statistically significant gains in word reading but the reading intervention plus comprehension intervention produced significant gains in reading comprehension (d = 0.29) and vocabulary (d = 0.34). Further evaluations of methods to improve word reading in this population are needed.     

Contributions of print exposure to first and second grade oral language and reading in Chile

This study examines the contribution of print exposure to oral language (expressive vocabulary and listening comprehension) and reading (word reading and reading comprehension) in first and second grade in Chile, and tests whether the contribution of print exposure to reading comprehension is mediated by language and word reading skills. Two‐hundred and eighty one children (mean age 6.55 years) participated. Print exposure was measured with a book‐cover recognition task in first grade, and outcomes were measured both in first and second grade. Print exposure had direct effects on all outcomes in first grade and indirect effects in second grade. Effects on first grade reading comprehension were partially mediated by listening comprehension and word reading, but not vocabulary. We discuss the importance of the findings for improving reading comprehension in countries with low access to books.     

Cognitive Difficulties in Struggling Comprehenders and Their Relation to Reading Comprehension: A Comparison of Group Selection and Regression-Based Models

ABSTRACT

Difficulties suppressing previously encountered but currently irrelevant information from working memory characterize less skilled comprehenders in studies in which they are matched to skilled comprehenders on word decoding and nonverbal IQ. These “extreme” group designs are associated with several methodological issues. When sample size permits, regression approaches permit a more accurate estimation of effects. Using data for students in Grades 6 through 12 (n = 766), regression techniques assessed the significance and size of the relation of suppression to reading comprehension across the distribution of comprehension skill. After accounting for decoding efficiency and nonverbal IQ, suppression, measured by performance on a verbal proactive interference task, accounted for a small amount of significant unique variance in comprehension (less than 1%). A comparison of suppression in less skilled comprehenders matched to more skilled comprehenders (48 per group) on age, word reading efficiency, and nonverbal IQ did not show significant group differences in suppression. The implications of the findings for theories of reading comprehension and for informing comprehension assessment and intervention are discussed.     

Intervention Provided to Linguistically Diverse Middle School Students with Severe Reading Difficulties

This study investigated the effectiveness of a multicomponent reading intervention implemented with middle school students with severe reading difficulties, all of whom had received remedial and/or special education for several years with minimal response to intervention. Participants were 38 students in grades 6-8 who had severe deficits in word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Most were Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) with identified disabilities. Nearly all demonstrated severely limited oral vocabularies in English and, for ELLs, in both English and Spanish. Students were randomly assigned to receive the research intervention (n = 20) or typical instruction provided in their school's remedial reading or special education classes (n = 18). Students in the treatment group received daily explicit and systematic small-group intervention for 40 minutes over 13 weeks, consisting of a modified version of a phonics-based remedial program augmented with English as a Second Language practices and instruction in vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension strategies. Results indicated that treatment students did not demonstrate significantly higher outcomes in word recognition, comprehension, or fluency than students who received the school's typical instruction and that neither group demonstrated significant growth over the course of the study. Significant correlations were found between scores on teachers' ratings of students' social skills and problem behaviors and posttest decoding and spelling scores, and between English oral vocabulary scores and scores in word identification and comprehension. The researchers hypothesize that middle school students with the most severe reading difficulties, particularly those who are ELLs and those with limited oral vocabularies, may require intervention of considerably greater intensity than that provided in this study. Further research directly addressing features of effective remediation for these students is needed.     

Identifying high-functioning dyslexics: is self-report of early reading problems enough?

We used a questionnaire to identify university students with self-reported difficulties in reading acquisition during elementary school (self-report; n=31). The performance of the self-report group on standardized measures of word and non-word reading and fluency, passage comprehension and reading rate, and phonological awareness was compared to that of two other groups of university students: one with a recent diagnosis (diagnosed; n=20) and one with no self-reported reading acquisition problems (comparison group; n=33). The comparison group outperformed both groups with a history of reading difficulties (self-report and diagnosed) on almost all measures. The self-report and diagnosed groups performed similarly on most tasks, with the exception of untimed reading comprehension (better performance for diagnosed) and reading rate (better performance for self-report). The two recruitment methods likely sample from the same underlying population but identify individuals with different adaptive strategies.     

The development of reading comprehension skills in children learning English as a second language

Reading comprehension is a multi-dimensional process that includes the reader, the text, and factors associated with the activity of reading. Most research and theories of comprehension are based primarily on research conducted with monolingual English speakers (L1). The present study was designed to investigate the cognitive and linguistic factors that have an influence on reading comprehension in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) speakers. The cognitive aspects of reading comprehension among L1 speakers and ESL speakers in the seventh grade were investigated. The performance of both groups was compared and the role of some relevant processes, including word reading, word reading fluency, phonological awareness, working memory, and morphological and syntactic awareness were assessed. Within this sample, three groups were examined: (1) children with poor comprehension (PC) in the absence of word reading difficulties (2) children with poor word reading and poor comprehension (poor readers, PR) (3) and children with both good word reading and comprehension abilities (good comprehenders, GC). The results demonstrated that a variety of cognitive processes, such as working memory and phonological, syntactic, and morphological awareness are important for reading comprehension and compromised in poor comprehenders. The GC group performed better than the PC group on all of the cognitive measures, indicating that comprehension depends on a variety of phonological, memory and linguistic processes and that adequate word recognition skill are important for reading comprehension. The prevalence of the ESL and L1 students was similar across the three reading groups. The ESL and L1 students demonstrated similar performance, indicating that the skills underlying reading comprehension are similar in the ESL and L1 students. This study demonstrated that ESL students are capable of developing word reading and reading comprehension skills that are as strong as those of their L1 peers.     

Word reading and reading comprehension: stability, overlap and independence

Longitudinal twin data were analyzed to investigate the etiology of the stability of genetic and environmental influences on word reading and reading comprehension, as well as the stability of those influences on their relationship. Participating twin pairs were initially tested at a mean age of 10.3 years, and retested approximately five years later. Both word reading and comprehension were found to be highly stable, and genetic influences were primarily responsible for that stability. In contrast to studies with younger participants, no unique genetic influences were observed at follow-up testing in this older sample. High genetic correlations were obtained between word reading and reading comprehension at both ages, indicating common genetic influences. However, significant genetic influence on comprehension was also observed, independent of that on word reading. Although the phenotypic relation between the two measures appeared to decline across time, the genetic etiology of this relation was highly stable.     

Improvements of self-regulation procedures for fifth graders' reading competence: Analyzing effects on reading comprehension,reading strategy performance,and motivation for reading

In this study, reciprocal teaching (RT) was combined with specific self-regulation procedures to promote the reading comprehension of fifth grade students. Twenty four classes with N = 534 students were assigned to RT plus strategy implementation procedures (RT + SIP), RT plus outcome regulation procedures (RT + ORP), RT plus strategy implementation and outcome regulation procedures (RT + SRL), or RT without explicit instruction in self-regulation. At maintenance students assigned to the three self-regulation conditions outperformed RT students according to a standardized measure of reading comprehension. RT + SIP and RT + SRL students outperformed RT as well as RT + ORP students using a measure of reading strategy performance. However, reading comprehension was only mediated by strategy performance under the RT + SRL condition. Among students assigned to the RT + ORP condition, an improvement in reading motivation between pretest and posttest and between posttest and maintenance was observed.     

The effect of a strategy training on reading comprehension in fourth-grade students

Previous studies have shown that instruction of reading strategies is an effective method for enhancing reading comprehension. However, many of the interventions in these studies focused on small groups of (poor) comprehenders and were provided by research assistants, making it time-consuming and relatively expensive. The authors implemented a strategy intervention to intact classrooms, consisting of reciprocal teaching and delivered by teachers. Participants were 510 typically developing fourth-grade students. A clustered randomized controlled trial was conducted with pretest, posttest, and follow-up measures to assess knowledge of reading strategies and reading comprehension. The results revealed that the intervention had an effect on knowledge of reading strategies at posttest and follow-up. However, the intervention did not affect reading comprehension performance. Together with the results of earlier studies, the present study raises the question whether strategy interventions are the most efficient to improve fourth-grade students' reading comprehension.     

Children learning to read later catch up to children reading earlier

Two studies from English-speaking samples investigated the methodologically difficult question of whether the later reading achievement of children learning to read earlier or later differs. Children (n = 287) from predominantly state-funded schools were selected and they differed in whether the reading instruction age (RIA) was either five or seven years. Study 1 covered the first six years of school following three cohorts across a two-year design. Analyses accounted for receptive vocabulary, reported parental income and education, school-community affluence, classroom instruction, home literacy environment, reading self-concept, and age. The earlier RIA group had initially superior letter naming, non-word, word, and passage reading but this difference in reading skill disappeared by age 11. In Study 2, the decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension performance of 83 additional middle school-age children was compared. The two groups exhibited similar reading fluency, but the later RIA had generally greater reading comprehension. Given that the design was non-experimental, we urge further research to better understand developmental patterns and influences arising from different RIAs.     

原形阅读理论的基本要点

本文扼要介绍了江苏省教育科学“十一五”规划重点资助课题“原形阅读理论与语文教学实践”研究成果中的12个理论要点,总称其为“原形阅读理论”。该理论认为课文阅读其本质上是思维活动,提出了“原形阅读”和“超原形阅读”这一对区分读文思维状态的新概念,并用阅读实验证明了这两种阅读思维印象的多项属性。丈中论述的语文阅读课堂“教学场”生成规律和“文言文弱语感教学法”,属于课程改革背景下用原形阅读理论研究语文教学的应用性收获。