The Effects of Reciprocal Teaching on Reading Comprehension and Reading Strategy Skills in Primary Level Students with Reading Disabilities

Seo, Jeonseong; Park, Hyunsook

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2000;5(1): 1-23.

Jeonseong Seo^` , and Hyunsook Park^`

서전성(Jeonseong Seo)| 박현숙(Hyunsook Park)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to test the effect s of reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension and reading strategy skills in reading disabled student s at the primary school level. The ultimate aim of the study was to provide information regarding the applicability of the reciprocal teaching method. Twenty elementary- school children with reading difficulties were selected (10 from the 2nd grade and 10 from the 3rd grade), based on the result s of the KEDI-WISC intelligence test and the reading comprehension subtest of the Basic Academic Skill Test . The subject s were divided into two groups, experimental and control. In reciprocal teaching, the subject s were trained by the explicit teaching on four reading strategies - - summarizing, questioning, predicting, and clarifying. This experiment , in which an experimenter and 2-3 subject s discussed the content s of text s, was continued for 25 minutes each day for twenty sessions. To test the effect s of this experiment , pretest and posttest of reading comprehension and reading strategy skills were conducted. ANCOVA was used to analyze the collected data utilizing pretest scores for reading comprehension and reading strategy skills as covariates. The result s of this study are summarized as follows : (1) A significant difference was found between the experimental and the control group in reading comprehension, showing significantly higher performance in the reciprocal teaching group. (2) In terms of reading strategy skills , significant differences were found between the two groups in summarizing, questioning, and predicting, that is, the experimental group showed significantly higher performance in the three strategies. However , no significant difference was found between the two groups in clarifying strategy. Based on the result s mentioned above, it could be concluded that overall reciprocal teaching had effect s on reading comprehension and reading strategy skills.