An investigation of reciprocal teaching on EFL learner's reading comprehension

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of reciprocal teaching on the English reading comprehension and metacognitive reading strategies of Iranian pre-university learners in a reading comprehension classroom. Method: To fulfill the purpose of the study, the participants, included 60 female junior high school students were randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups each consisting of 30 learners. The experimental group was taught through reciprocal teaching while the control group was taught through traditional teaching method. Following a pretest, treatment, and a posttest, the obtained data was analyzed using paired t-test to examine the effects of the independent variables. Findings: The results of the analysis indicated that reciprocal teaching had a significantly positive effect on the English reading comprehension and usage of the four main metacognitive reading strategies of the students. The posttest mean score of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group at 0.05 level. However, less proficient learners reported high favor of the reciprocal strategy compared to the learners with higher level of proficiency. It is noteworthy that both experimental and control group had a better performance on the posttest when compared with the pretest. The findings are discussed as far as effective reciprocal teaching is concerned in a foreign language teaching context.