This chapter explains the design of the study, including the setting and the background of the school population, the participants of the study, data collection procedure,data resources and data analysis. The setting of the study and the background information of the participants were provided first. Then the procedure and teaching materials were clearly introduced, followed by data resources and data collection and analysis.
Setting
This study was conducted in a junior high school in Taoyuan City, Taiwan. The school is a medium-size one, with twenty-four classes in each grade. The students were mostly from average social-economical family. Because the reading class was one of the club activities in the school, all the students had to choose their club activity by ranking their choices of the twenty-four clubs. Then, the students were randomly assigned to one specific club by the computer system. Most of the students did not put the reading class in high rankings. The students were mostly mid achievers and low achievers according to their performance on school exams. The low achievers had problems with learning English especially in vocabulary, grammar, and even reading. The mid achievers were better readers and were willing to respond to teachers in class. Due to the traditional teaching in Taiwan, not all students had chances to pose questions from a text, make summaries, or even clarify their ideas in class. They rarely had class discussion to construct meaning from texts. They hardly know how to monitor their own learning process in class. Originally, the students were supposed to attend the reading class every two weeks. However, based on the
school schedule, the students needed to attend the reading class two to three times each month, with ninety minutes per session.
Participants
The students were randomly assigned to this reading class (a club activity) by the computer system. They are seven eighth-graders, three males and four females.
Because Reciprocal Teaching puts emphasis on dialogue and discussion among teachers and students, the students were divided into two groups with three and four people in each group. In the group, the students are mixed proficiency with mid and low achievers. The students learned English with Reciprocal Teaching, which focuses on the four strategies—predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Most of the students approximately had five to six years of English learning experience from the third grade in elementary schools. Three of the students have learned English at an earlier age. Their English ability was mostly average or below average according to their English test scores in school exams. Three of the students went to cram schools, and all of them reported that they hardly spend extra time learning English or have English reading activity. They only spent time doing the school homework. Only one girl spent extra time reading English magazines, and two of them watched English movies and listened to English songs as extra English learning activities. They also reported that English learning is difficult and three of them were far behind their classmates in their original class and had to take the remedial tests every semester.
Three of them held a passive attitude toward English learning. To fulfill the essence of scaffolding of Reciprocal Teaching, the seven participants were divided into two groups so that there were two mid proficient students in each group. The mid proficient students could provide support for the low proficient students. Group A
included Elaine, Eric, and Simon, and Group B included Ruby, Joy, Jane and John.
They were listed with a pseudo name. The following table is the background information of the participants:
As for the grouping, the participants, Eric and Elaine, are from the same class, and they work well together in the same group. According to their choice and the working atmosphere in the group, the researcher had them stay in the same group. For Group B, the mid proficiency students, Joy and Ruby, work well and discuss in a good harmony in group discussion though they didn't know each other before the class started and they were willing to lead the discussion and teach the low proficiency students.
Before the intervention, the researcher had conducted some reading activities with the students as pilot studies. The books used then were of similar reading difficulty to the books used in the main study.
Table 1 The information of the participants
Pseudo
Name Gender Ranking of
the class Language
proficiency School
score Group Remedial
tests Cram
school Years of learning
Elaine F 1 Mid 70-75 A ✓ 5.5
Eric M 9 Mid 75-85 A ✓ 6.5
Simon M 23 Low 20-25 A ✓ 5.5
Ruby F 9 Mid 80-85 B 5.5
Joy F 13 Mid 80-85 B ✓ 7.5
Jane F 21 Low 20-35 B ✓ 7.5
John M 20 Low 10-20 B ✓ 5.5
Procedure
The following section presents the implementation procedures of Reciprocal Teaching and the teaching materials used during the intervention.
Implementation of Reciprocal Teaching
The researcher was in charge of the reading class for the whole semester, from late March to June in 2016. The researcher introduced Reciprocal Teaching explicitly to the students in the reading class. The students attended the reading class for 90 minutes on Wednesday mornings. In total, eight sessions were included. Before the intervention started, the researcher had distributed a questionnaire (See Appendix One) to understand the students’ background and then divided them into two groups according to their performance on school exams.
To follow the principle of scaffolding and ZPD in Reciprocal Teaching, the eight-session intervention was divided into two phases: teacher-led and student-led stages.
In the teacher-led stage, the instructor assumed the dominant role, introducing and demonstrating the strategy use, while the students took their time, observing the teacher and witnessing the whole process. When involved in the group discussion led by the teacher, students were given chances to practice the strategy. In the student-led stage, when students gained some understanding on the target strategies, they then started to take more responsibility and further organized their own discussion, while the teacher faded the dominant role and shifted to a facilitating role, giving prompts and cues to remind students of the target strategies. Such a two-stage design fulfilled the scaffolding and teacher-fading principles of Reciprocal Teaching. In addition, whether the discussion was led by the teacher or the students, it fulfilled the constructivist essence of Reciprocal Teaching.
The teacher-led stage was composed of the first four sessions. For each session, only one strategy was introduced and practiced. For the first meeting, the predicting strategy was introduced, followed by questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Based on the literature of Reciprocal Teaching, the instructional sequence of the four strategies had little to do with the learning outcomes. Different researchers have attempted different kinds of sequence, and each has shown satisfying results. In this study, predicting was introduced first because it was a good pre-reading and while-reading activity which prepared students for the while-reading first. When first encountered a text, students were triggered to use the predicting strategy based on the title. Then, questioning and clarifying were introduced because during the reading process, the students may encounter text-related questions and ideas that need clarification to understand the meaning. Therefore, it is the right time for the two strategies to be introduced. Finally, summarizing was placed in the end because in order to master the strategy, students need to fully understand the meaning of the text and further organize their summary in a sequential order. A good summary indicated whether students fully understood the text or not.
In the teacher-led stage, when introducing a new strategy, the instructor/
researcher always began with the definition, explanation, and importance of the target strategy. The teacher led the students to read a paragraph and applied the newly introduced strategy in the reading process. For example, in introducing the strategy of questioning, the researcher would give a clear introduction of the strategy first and then reading took place. In reading each paragraph, the researcher came up with a question related to the text. By doing so, students could observe how the instructor employed the strategy and imitate the way the researcher did it. Later, the researcher
had the students generate their own questions and write down their questions on the worksheet. After practice, the researcher would ask the students to write down their questions and share their answers with the whole class. By doing so, the researcher could understand whether the students know how to use the strategy and further inspire other students to come up with better questions. The process of students’
practice and teacher-led discussion would continue until the whole text was read. For the detailed procedure, the lesson plans for each strategy are included in Appendix Two.
In the first class in the student-led stage, the researcher reviewed the four strategies first. After the explanation, the researcher then faded the dominant role, shifted to that of an observer and facilitator, and only offered help when needed. Then, the researcher had the students carry out their own discussion independently in a group and employ the four strategies to reading the story during the discussion. The students had to predict, generate questions, clarify their ideas, and make a brief summary. Meanwhile, they were asked to finish a worksheet to include their predictions, questions, clarifications, and summary. The format of the worksheet was included in Appendix Three. The process of the group discussion was recorded to help the researcher understand how the students constructed meanings and comprehended the stories with the target strategies. Also, during the group discussion, they had to make comments and respond to one another within the group in Chinse. The whole reading process was the same as the teacher-led stage. The only difference was that the students took more responsibilities and organized their group discussion by themselves. There was a discussion leader in each group that led the discussion and organized the reading process. The group members had to make predictions, ask
questions, clarify their ideas, and write a summary when they finished reading the story. All the group members worked collaboratively to understand the story and complete the worksheet. At this time, the instructor/researcher became less dominant.
The students had to finish three stories on their own in the student-led stage; the instructor/researcher became an observer and only provided prompts and cues when it was necessary.
The implementation of the study and the target strategy introduced in each session are summarized in Table 2 below:
Table 2 Procedure of the study
Teacher-led stage 2nd 3/2 Predicting The Miner and the Gnome 3rd 3/9 Questioning Town Mouse and Country Mouse 4th 3/30 Clarifying Rapunzel
graders and had basic reading skills—they could read simple English and had the knowledge of simple sentence structures. Picture books were written in simple language and are mostly narrative stories, so the students can take hold of the sequences without difficulty. Also, the contents of the picture books are more interesting than textbooks used in schools and more reader-friendly to the EFL students in this study. Seven picture books were used. In the teacher-led stage, one book was used for one strategy training; therefore, four books were read in this phase.
In the student-led stage, the researcher asked the students to read the rest three books to provide enough opportunities to utilize and synthesize the four strategies to the full extent. The following table shows the information of the teaching materials used in this study.
Table 3 The level of the seven picture books
Data Sources
Since this study is an action research, qualitative data was collected and analyzed to answer the research questions. Five data sources were included in the study to answer the research questions.
Book title Word count RR (Reading
Recovery) level Grade Level Text type
The miner and the gnome 356 16 one narrative
Town mouse and country mouse 277 16 one narrative
Rapunzel 354 17 one narrative
Tug of war 370 17 one narrative
The tortoise and the birds 315 16 one narrative
King Midas 304 17 one narrative
Hedda and the ogre 336 17 one narrative
Open-ended perception questionnaire
To answer the first research question, a self-report questionnaire (See Appendix Four) was administered to explore the students’ attitude and perception about Reciprocal Teaching. There are ten open-ended questions in the questionnaire, requiring the students to write down their opinions toward Reciprocal Teaching. The questionnaire was adopted from the work by Chern (2005) and Shiau (2010). Some similar questions were raised in this questionnaire in order to make comparison with the two studies after the intervention. The ten questions can be grouped into four categories. The first is about learners’ overall perception of Reciprocal Teaching, including Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9 and 10. The second category is about learners’
attitude toward each strategy use, for example Question 5. The third category is about learners’ attitude toward future employment of Reciprocal Teaching, including Questions 6 and 7. Considering students’ proficiency level, the Chinese version was used, so that the participants can read and answer the questions without language barriers. The students were encouraged to write as much and as clearly as possible to express their true feelings no matter they held a positive or a negative attitude toward Reciprocal Teaching. They were informed that the researcher was interested in their opinions for future improvement and modification. By doing so, the researcher hoped to collect informative and genuine comments from the students. The questionnaire was distributed to the students three weeks after the intervention. The data would be used as qualitative description of students’ attitude and perception.
Weekly worksheets
To answer the second research question, weekly worksheet was adopted. For the use of weekly worksheet, Rosenshine and Meister (1994) stated that while most
studies on Reciprocal Teaching were quantitative-oriented and only presented the final outcome, the on-going process during the implementation was little known.
Seeing the gap, the researcher utilized weekly worksheets to document students’
performance in class and to tap on the effect of the strategy use by each participant.
This aims to identify possible progress and difficulty that the students may have in the reading process. For example, students may be more engaged in the classroom discussion, and they might become more capable and willing to express themselves with the familiarity of the target strategies. Also, the worksheet helped to explore how students employed the target strategies to understand the stories. Students might handle the four strategies better after the treatment and might learn how to clarify their ideas when they encountered unknown words or unclear sentences.
The weekly worksheet was used to identify whether the students utilized the target strategies and how well they handled the target strategies. Also, the weekly worksheet might provide the researcher with the information about students’ progress after the intervention. The adoption of the worksheet was inspired by Chern’s (2005) and Shiau’s studies (2010); both researchers, investigating Reciprocal Teaching, had their students work on the worksheet. In this study, students had to write down their practice and questions in accordance with the story. From the worksheet, the researcher would like to know whether the students did employ the target strategies—
predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing in the student-led stage. The worksheet provided information about what prediction the students made, what questions they generated in their group discussion, how they clarified their ideas, and what they included in their summary.
Verbal Interaction Data
In the student-led stage, the process of the group discussion was recorded. With the recorded data, the researcher can identify the students’ difficulties while they employed the four strategies. Also, the data provided a clear idea a-bout how students make prediction, raise questions, and clarify their ideas, and how they reach the consensus to write a summary in groups. All the reading processes were documented and used as an index for the researcher to identify students’ potential progress after the intervention. The data showed if they predicted in a correct way, how students posed their questions, how they found clues in the texts to solve their confusion, and what ideas they included in the summary. In addition, the data revealed how students got support and assistance from their peers in the group discussion and how they worked together to construct meaning from the texts. Also, the data showed the change of their performance in English reading with the instruction and training of Reciprocal Teaching. The data and the worksheet helped to answer the second research question on how Reciprocal Teaching helped students understand the text better.
Interview
To understand students’ perception of their comprehension and motivational change with Reciprocal Teaching, the researcher/instructor asked each of the participants two questions after the questionnaire section: (1) Did Reciprocal Teaching help you understand the text better? (2) Does your motivation toward English learning with the help from Reciprocal Teaching? The two questions helped to answer research question 2 and question 3. The students orally reported their response and the researcher took notes of their responses. The interview of each
person lasted 5-10 minutes. While asking their comprehension, the researcher provided some possible answers so that students attributed their understanding to the following factors (e.g., support from the peers, group discussion, and strategy use).
When asked about motivational change, the participants also needed to provide reasons why their motivation increased or remained the same.
Observation notes
To collect data, the researcher documented students’ discussion and performance in class. During the teacher-led and student-led stages, the researcher/instructor took notes of the students’ performance and engagement in class. In class, while the researcher was giving instruction, she observed students’ response, interaction, and the extent of their involvement in the reading process. After the class, the researcher wrote down the observation on how the students practiced the target strategies. The notes focused on how students used the strategies to understand the texts and how they interacted with one another in group discussion. The notes helped to explain students’ perception and motivational change after the intervention. Their engagement and performance in class indicated their positive or negative perception and attitude toward Reciprocal Teaching.
Data Analysis
In analyzing the data from the questionnaire, the researcher first read the students’ individual questionnaire to understand how each of them perceived and commented on Reciprocal Teaching. Then, the researcher translated each student’s response into English. Later, the researcher compared and synthesized students’
answers to each question and put this in the result section. Their written responses helped to reveal their perception and attitude toward Reciprocal Teaching as well as
their perception of comprehension, and motivational change toward English reading
their perception of comprehension, and motivational change toward English reading