In this section, relevant studies on reciprocal teaching are presented and are categorized based on either English-speaking or EFL context. And it is found that while there has been rich literature on both contexts, most of the studies in the English-speaking context are carried out among students with different learning problems. In contrast, most of the studies in Taiwan, an EFL context, are implemented on the average students. Students with particular need such as strugglers are ignored.
Studies conducted in English-speaking context
As one of the pioneer works, Palincsar and Brown (1984) implemented reciprocal teaching on thirty-seven seventh graders among which twenty-four were reported to be poor comprehenders with reading problems. They were, on average, two years below the expected grade performance. The thirty-seven students were randomly assigned to four treatment conditions. Only one group received the instruction of reciprocal teaching; the other three served as control groups. Among the three groups, one was trained with the skill of information location which was long recognized in research and in classroom scenarios as useful remedial training. As for the other two groups, they were not given any instruction except for regular tests. The teaching materials were all expository stories correspondent to the difficulty level for a seventh grader. The result indicated that students in the reciprocal teaching group
outperformed their counterparts in both research-developed and standardized tests.
The former was administered periodically during the intervention, while the latter was performed as a delayed post-test three months after the treatment. In addition to the quantitative evidence, reciprocally trained students also demonstrated great improvement in their classroom dialogues. They could, gradually, generate more complete statements and summaries with their own words, and better seize the main ideas of a text.
In Lysynchuk, Pressley and Vye’s study (1990), a total of seventy-two grade four and grade seven students were sampled. All of them were English-speaking Canadians from different schools. Prior to the study, students were assigned to either control or experimental group based on their performance in the standardized Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test as the pre-test during the implementation. The only difference between the control and experimental groups was the instruction of the four strategies in reciprocal teaching. Thus, while students in the experimental group were reciprocally trained, their counterparts received more traditional teacher-led instruction in which the instructor was the only one who offered any needed assistance. After thirteen training sessions, reciprocally taught students outperformed their counterparts no matter in the daily assessments or in the two standardized tests implemented and compared as pre and post-tests.
In Alfassi’s study (1998), the participants were seventy-five first-year high school students who were recognized as adequate decoders but poor comprehenders.
Her research was to testify whether reciprocal teaching was superior to the traditional instruction of skill acquisition when both were implemented as remedial instruction.
To answer the question, she had fifty-three students in the experimental group exposed to reciprocal teaching while the rest twenty-two students in the control group exposed to the training of skill acquisition. After a twenty-day intervention, students receiving reciprocal teaching outperformed their counterparts in the researcher-developed exam. However, there was no difference when the administered exam was a standardized test.
Like Alfassi’s study (1998), Alfassi, Weiss, and Lifshitz’s study (2009) compared the effectiveness between reciprocal teaching and traditional skill acquisition when implemented as remedial instruction. However, in their study, the subjects were thirty-five students aged from fifteen to twenty-one with mild and moderate intellectual disability. The researchers’ belief was that while sociocultural approaches were recognized as useful for learners with mental retardation, reciprocal teaching, also featured with socio-constructivism, should also benefit learners with this special need. To verify this, the researchers arranged nineteen students in the experimental group and sixteen in the control group. Thus, the former received reciprocal
instruction while the latter skill learning. After a twelve-week intervention, it was found that reciprocally trained students gained greater progress in three different kinds of reading exams. And a delayed-post test implemented twelve weeks later after the intervention also showed that students in the experimental group were still equipped with the ability of summarization and question generation.
In Jane and Diane’s study (2003), reciprocal teaching was implemented on their students in a middle school. To help their students achieve better reading comprehension, the two researchers adopted reciprocal teaching in their intact classes in which students were composed heterogeneously with varied abilities, and some of them were even diagnosed with learning disability. After one year implementation, the result showed impressive gains on standardized tests administered by one of the researchers and the school. The progress was most distinctive among students with middle and higher proficiency. Also, data collected from students’ learning journals and teacher-student interviews showed that students were more involved in classroom discussion, which improved the quality of classroom dialogues. Students were more likely to ask questions and give comments in class, became more independent readers with deeper thoughts, and monitored their own learning and thinking while reading.
Studies conducted in Taiwan
In Chou’s study (2008), in order to verify the possible efficacy of reciprocal
teaching on EFL students, she had one class of students receive reciprocal teaching while the other traditional reading instruction. After the ten-week training, it was found that while both groups had significant progress on a reading exam which was served as both pre- and post-tests, the improvement in the experimental group was even greater. Also, from students’ think-aloud protocols, it was found that while students in the experimental group applied the learned strategies to their reading process, the strategy use was not found in the control group. Meanwhile, most of the students in the experimental group held positive attitudes toward reciprocal teaching.
In Su’s study (2010), in order to validate the efficacy of reciprocal teaching on students with vocational background, he recruited sixty students from a university of technology. Half of the participants were assigned to an experimental group receiving reciprocal teaching while those in the control group were trained with grammar-translation method. After an eleven-week intervention, no difference was revealed between the two groups as to their performance in the standardized test of GEPT high-intermediate level. However, for the experimental group, there was significant improvement between their pre- and post-test results. Also, based on the interview and the meta-cognitive awareness questionnaire, students in the experimental group gained more confidence in reading strategically and held positive attitudes toward reciprocal teaching.
Different from most studies that examined the effect of reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension, Shiau (2010) extended the research focus to the possible efficacy of reciprocal teaching in developing learners’ critical and creative thinking.
Her participants were thirty-six freshman high school students who received a six-week strategy training. The result was based on weekly questions generated by students and the perception questionnaire. The former was to see whether reciprocal teaching could facilitate and sharpen students’ thinking ability while the latter was used to probe into students’ perception of reciprocal teaching. The result showed that although students still tended to ask lower level questions, like factual and interpretational questions, their questions gradually had more variation. And from the questionnaires, students expressed their positive attitude toward reciprocal teaching which enabled them to be more strategic, active, and self-conscious. They also viewed the strategy of summarizing as the most beneficial one but the most difficult one to acquire as well.
2.3 Summary
In summary, the issue of strategy use was first noticed and researched in the investigation of good learners’ characteristics. Until now, there has been rich literature on strategy use, which can be classified into three categories: the identification and classification of strategy use, what influences strategy use, and the effects of strategy
instruction. Belonging to the third category, reciprocal teaching now has been widely examined and applied in the English-speaking contexts among different students, even those with comprehension difficulties, learning disability, and mental retardation.
In contrast, while reciprocal teaching has received more and more attention in Taiwan, an EFL context, but there have been scarcely no studies probing into its possible effect on English struggling learners. Most students center on the average students as reviewed previously in Chou’s (2008), Su’s (2010) and Chiau’s (2010) works. To bridge the gap, I therefore propose the present study. I would like to implement reciprocal teaching in my remedial course. There are four students in this class. Hence, the study would be both a case study and action research. I would like to examine how reciprocal teaching may assist my students’ learning, particularly for reading.
The details of the study will be presented in the next chapter.