| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === Reading is a complex behavior. It needs various strategies to construct meaning from the text. However, junior high school students in Taiwan are seldom instructed with strategic behavior. In traditional reading classrooms, teachers only measure comprehension instead of teaching strategies to enhance comprehension. Many L1 and L2 studies showed that reciprocal teaching is effective in promoting learners’ reading comprehension, but few are conducted to examine its efficiency on EFL learners. Therefore, this study explores the effects of reciprocal teaching on EFL junior high school students’ reading comprehension and strategy use. Additionally, the study also probes the students’ response to reciprocal teaching.
The subjects were 70 ninth-grade junior high school students from two mixed-level classes. One received the reciprocal teaching instruction as the experimental group while the other received the traditional reading instruction as the control group. A ten-week reciprocal teaching instruction with its focus on the four metacognitive strategies, predicting, summarizing, questioning, and clarifying, was conducted in the experimental group. In addition to strategy instruction, reciprocal teaching also placed great emphasis on modeling, guided practice, and independent application. The instruments of the study included a reading comprehension test, a think-aloud procedure, and a response questionnaire. To analyze the collected data, two paired samples t-tests were used to measure the scores of the pre-and posttest in reading comprehension. As for analyzing the subjects’ strategy use, the subjects’ think aloud protocols were transcribed and analyzed inductively in terms of the reading strategies. With regard to the subjects’ response towards reciprocal teaching, descriptive statistics are adopted to present the results .
The findings show, first, reciprocal teaching was more beneficial in enhancing EFL junior high school students’ reading comprehension in Taiwan than the traditional reading instruction. Even though significant differences were found in both groups, the reading comprehension was improved much more in the experimental group than in the control group. Furthermore, reciprocal teaching had an influence on subjects’ strategy use and metacognitive awareness; however, the traditional reading instruction did not. Finally, most subjects were affirmative about the efficiency of reciprocal teaching on promoting and monitoring comprehension. Among the four strategies, they considered the strategies of clarifying and summarizing most effective on increasing their comprehension. The results suggest that reciprocal teaching can be an alternative for teaching reading in an EFL junior high school classroom. Moreover, for metacognitive training in reading to be successful, teachers should give students many opportunities and much time to practice applying the strategies.
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