Stage I contained two sessions. Two strategies were introduced in each session respectively. Since explicit instruction was strongly recommended for reading strategy instruction (Snow, 2002), the teacher defined and explained the target strategies directly in the beginning of each session in order to help students monitor and regulate their comprehension process. After the explanation, the students understood how reciprocal teaching worked.
What should be noted is that the demonstration aimed to familiarize subjects with the four metacognitive skills: predicting, clarifying, summarizing, and
questioning. Among them, no particular order was required. However, it is
recommended that the strategies should be taught one at a time with a review of the strategies taught earlier. Besides, repeated practice and strategy application should be sufficient to ensure the effects (Hashey & Connors, 2003; Palincsar & Klenk, 1992).
In Session 1, predicting and clarifying strategies were covered. In the first five
minutes, a handout of guides for roles in reciprocal teaching (See Appendix A) and a worksheet with the assigned article (Appendix B), both adapted from Oczkus (2003), were distributed to the students. The handout consisted of 11 procedural prompts often employed in four strategies while the worksheet comprised an article for demonstration. The procedural prompts on the handout functioned as clues to specify the strategies and to guide beginners to think in the logic of the strategies. Eventually, participants would become familiar with them. The worksheet was for students to make a record of their reasoning process. This recording helped students become familiar with the content by writing down what they had in mind.
After the distribution, the teacher explained what predicting was and
demonstrated how to predict by reading the title and by looking at the picture along with the article. Next, students were asked to write down their prediction(s) on the worksheet. Then, the teacher invited the students to read the first paragraph aloud to confirm the previous prediction. After the participants got a clear idea of the first paragraph, the teacher made another prediction about what would happen in the second paragraph. Meanwhile, students were also encouraged to predict with the teacher. Still, they had to write down the prediction on the worksheet. Then, students read the second paragraph together to check the prediction. If the prediction did not match the content, they could revise it. If it was right, they could move on to the next paragraph. The same steps were repeated until the reading was completed. During the demonstration, new vocabulary was not explained. New words and questions were saved for the next part of the session, which was the demonstration of the strategy of clarifying.
In the second part of the session, the instructor introduced the strategy of clarifying. The instructor first bold-faced and underlined the unknown words and confusing ideas in the article (See Appendix B). Then, the teacher modeled to solve
the problems by clarifying, including using the context to get the possible meaning or employing the prior knowledge to make meaningful and reasonable guesses. Students also needed to finish the clarifying part on the worksheet. At the end of Session 1, students were asked to think about what the main idea of the article was. This technique connected their present knowledge of the article to the next strategy, summarizing.
The strategy of summarizing was introduced in the first part of Session 2. The instructor started with introducing the difference between the main ideas and
supporting details. Students needed to know that a summary could only include the essence of an article, not the details of it. The idea of topic sentences might help the student locate the key point illustrated in a paragraph in some descriptive articles.
Besides, topic sentences might serve to facilitate the use of predicting strategy.
Experienced readers can begin with the topic sentence, make a possible guess about the development, and predict the future events. The double benefits provided by topic sentences proved again that the four strategies are reciprocal and can work together.
After the brief introduction of the difference between key points and supporting sentences, the instructor modeled how to make a summary in one or two sentences for the two paragraphs.
Finally, the teacher introduced the strategy of questioning in the second part of Session 2. At first, the instructor invited students to generate questions about the assigned article. With the gist in mind, students generated questions of all kinds quickly. The instructor wrote down the questions which were raised by the volunteers on the blackboard and put them into two categories: skinny questions and fat
questions (Hashey & Connors, 2003). The former could be answered simply with yes, no, or any short responses based on the text while the latter call for deeper thoughts and complete answers. The instructor asked students what kinds of questions would
be proposed by the teacher more frequently and showed them how to get the correct answers to the questions. Then, the students would understand that this technique will bring them closer to the kinds of questions that teachers have in mind.
A sample is provided in Appendix C to demonstrate the use of four strategies to read the first paragraph of an article named Solar Power in Book Five from Kang Hsuan (康軒).
One article, i. e. Solar Power, was used in Stage I to demonstrate four strategies.
Using the same article benefited the demonstration in two ways. One advantage was Session 2 could start without delays caused by unfamiliarity with a newly-introduced article. In other words, students could make use of the third and fourth strategies immediately in Session 2 since they were already familiar with the content of the article. It could ensure the teaching procedure to be carried out efficiently within a period of limited time. The other advantage of using the same article was to show students that the four strategies of reciprocal teaching can be integrated into the reading of one article. Stated another way, participants could apply all four strategies to one article and gained a clearer comprehension of it.