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Literacy Online. Every child literate - a shared responsibility.

Reciprocal teaching

Reciprocal teaching and literature circles are not usually thought of as approaches to reading but provide useful contexts for developing literacy learning.

Reciprocal teaching is a useful small-group procedure to help improve the comprehension and critical thinking of fluent readers. Studies have shown that when students take part in reciprocal teaching of reading, their comprehension improves (including their listening comprehension) and they transfer the learning into other reading contexts. Reciprocal teaching has been found to be effective in improving the achievement of learners from diverse backgrounds. It involves four explicit strategies for reading comprehension:

  • formulating questions to stimulate thoughtful discussion;
  • clarifying ideas in the text;
  • predicting what might follow, using prior knowledge and information in the text;
  • summarising information in the text.

The teacher initially leads the group, explaining and modelling the strategies to show how the reader actively constructs meaning. The students gradually take over more and more of the responsibility by taking turns to lead the group and generate discussion as the group members jointly examine and interpret a text.




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