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VELS level 5 & 6 – Guided reading: Reciprocal Teaching

This section explains the strategy of Reciprocal Teaching and provides information about its use in the classroom.

Reciprocal Teaching refers to an instructional approach that takes place in the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding text. It involves the teacher and students in reading, talking and critically thinking about a text. The teacher and students take turns assuming the role of leading the dialogue.

The dialogue is structured by the use of the following strategies:

  • predicting
  • clarifying
  • generating questions to explore literal, inferential and evaluative comprehension
  • summarising

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Reciprocal Teaching for reading

Reciprocal Teaching is a comprehensive teaching strategy that is suitable for working with passages of longer text that will be exploited for a variety of purposes. It is where students can take more ownership to explore the meaning of complex texts in all domains.

Reciprocal Teaching has two main features:

  • explicit instruction and practice of predicting, clarifying, generating questions and summarising
  • apprenticeship where students assume the role of the teacher in supporting their peers construct meaning from text.

Guided reading - Reciprocal Teaching videos - In the following video clips teachers and their students demonstrate the strategies for reciprocal teaching: predicting, clarifying, question generating, and summarising.

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Planning for Reciprocal Teaching

Text selection

  • select the text
  • generate salient questions for sections of the text
  • generate possible predictions about each text section
  • underline summarizing sentences
  • circle difficult vocabulary.

Decisions about students

  • decide whether students can read the text independently or whether they will need supporting the form of teacher reading or peer support
  • decide which students will be able to lead each of the reciprocal teaching activities.

Steps

  1. Organise students into groups of four or five students
  2. Give a student the role of leader, which involves being:
  • predictor
  • clarifier
  • questioner
  • summariser

Note: a student experiencing literacy difficulties within the group could be supported by having a partner for the leader role. Alternatively, students could be assigned a role each. A group should never be larger than six.

  1. The predictor makes some predictions about the content of the text. For example,‘I think this piece will be about how bad the air pollution is in the world’.
  2. The group reads the text together. Break up the text into smaller parts, if necessary.

The leader performs the following tasks then hands over to another student for the next section of text:

  • the clarifier – answers questions any member of the group might have, by going back to the text and rephrasing, explaining it in their own way and clarifying the part under question. It is the leader’s responsibility to make sure everyone understands the text
  • the questioner – formulates questions about the main ideas in the text in order to help others’ understanding of the text
  • the summariser – then tries to sum up the key points of the section in few sentences.

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Reciprocal Teaching in detail

Research into literacy learning in the Middle Years in Australia (Culican et al, 2001) highlights the importance of students in Years 5–9 engaging with complex and diverse texts as a vehicle to understand and connect with their world. It also emphasises how each area of the curriculum has its own literacy through the notion of ‘curriculum literacies’. (Cumming & Wyatt-Smith, 2001)

Reciprocal Teaching is invaluable in supporting ongoing student literacy development. The process allows teachers and students to jointly construct meaning from text for any Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) domain, fostering a collaborative approach where students take responsibility as ongoing learners.

The purpose of Reciprocal Teaching is to facilitate a group effort between teacher and students as well as among students in the task of bringing meaning to the text.

Reciprocal Teaching involves the teacher and students in reading, talking and critically thinking about a text. The text should be instructional, at a level that has some challenges for the students but where most vocabulary can be read correctly.

Initially, the teacher takes an active role in leading the discussion to improve the comprehension of the material being read. This collaborative, problem-solving dialogue involves talk that is purposeful and relaxed and provides opportunities to expand, explore, and extend.

Once students have gained an independent application of the strategies, the teacher continues to be an active member but students can take on the leader role.

In summary, this strategy supports students to construct meaning from text as well as a means of monitoring their reading to ensure that they in fact understand what they read.

There are four distinct stages, each selected for the following purpose:

  • predicting
  • clarifying
  • question generating
  • summarising

Predicting

Predicting occurs when students hypothesize what the author will discuss next in the text. In order to do this successfully, students must activate the relevant background knowledge that they already possess regarding the topic. The students have a purpose for reading: to confirm or disprove their hypotheses.

Furthermore, the opportunity has been created for the students to link the new knowledge they will encounter in the text with the knowledge they already possess. The predicting strategy also facilitates use of text structure as students learn that headings, subheadings, and questions imbedded in the text are useful means of anticipating what might occur next.

Clarifying

Clarifying is an activity that is particularly important when working with students who have a history of comprehension difficulty. These students may believe that the purpose of reading is only about saying the words correctly; they may have not yet registered that the words, and the passage, are not making sense to them.

When the students are asked to clarify, their attention is called to the fact that there may be many reasons why text is difficult to understand such as new vocabulary, unclear reference words, and unfamiliar and perhaps difficult concepts.

They are taught to be alert to the effects of such impediments to comprehension and to take the necessary measures to restore meaning (e.g., reread, ask for help).

Question generating

Question generating reinforces the summarising strategy and carries the learner one more step along in the comprehension activity. When students generate questions, they first identify the kind of information that is significant enough to provide the substance for a question.

They then pose this information in question form and self-test to ascertain that they can indeed answer their own question. Question generating is a flexible strategy to the extent that students can be taught and encouraged to generate questions at many levels. For example, some school situations require that students master supporting detail information; others require that the students be able to infer or apply new information from text.

Summarising

Summarising provides the opportunity to identify and integrate the most important information in the text. Text can be summarised across sentences, across paragraphs, and across the passage as a whole. When the students first begin the Reciprocal Teaching procedure, their efforts are generally focused at the sentence and paragraph levels. As they become more proficient, they are able to integrate at the paragraph and passage levels.

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Selecting text

When selecting text for students, teachers consider the following:

  • Is the information in the text connected and organized?
  • Are the sentences grammatically complex, using embedded and subordinate clauses?
  • How long are the sentences?
  • Is there technical/subject specific vocabulary that may be unfamiliar?
  • Are words used that assume a specific cultural knowledge?
  • Does the text avoid stereotyping?
  • Does the text omit important information?
  • Does the text acknowledge the experience and backgrounds of different groups?
  • Does the text have a clear and predictable layout?
  • Is there an acceptable amount of text per page?
  • Do the headings, labels and illustrations relate to the content?