Reciprocal Teaching - Current Uses

Current Uses

The reciprocal teaching model has been in use for the past 20 years (Williams, 2011) and has been adopted by a number of school districts and reading intervention programs across the United States and Canada. It has also been used as the model for a number of commercially produced reading programs such as Soar to Success. Unfortunately, according to Williams, most students and teachers in this country have "never even heard of it" (2011).

Reciprocal teaching is also being adopted and researched in countries other than the United States. For example, Yu-Fen Yang of Taiwan conducted a study to develop a reciprocal teaching/learning strategy in remedial English reading classes (2010). Yang's study concluded that "...students expressed that they observed and learned from the teacher’s or their peers’ externalization of strategy usage. Students’ reading progress in the remedial instruction incorporating the RT system was also identified by the pre- and post-tests. This study suggests that there may be benefits for teachers in encouraging students to interact with others in order to clarify and discuss comprehension questions and constantly monitor and regulate their own reading" (2010).

In a 2008 study presented effective implementation of reciprocal teaching to students diagnosed with mild to moderate forms of disability. Within this group, ten percent of students had difficulty in learning due to Down Syndrome. The average of the participants was around eighteen years of age. The researchers, Miriam Alfassi, Itzhak Weiss, and Hefziba Lifshitz, developed a study based on Palincsar and Brown's design of reciprocal teaching for students who were considered academically too low for the complex skills of reading comprehension. The study compared two styles of teaching, remediation/direct instruction to Palincsar/Brown reciprocal teaching. After twelve weeks of instruction and assessments, reciprocal teaching was found to produce a greater success rate in improving the literacy skills in the participants with mild to moderate learning disabilities. After the study was completed, researchers recommended reciprocal teaching so that students are taught in an interactive environment that includes meaningful and connected texts. This research for the European Journal of Special Needs Education, promotes reciprocal teaching for its structure in dialogues and how students learn to apply those dialogues based on the reading taking place in instruction.

Currently in the United States research has also been conducted on the use of reciprocal teaching in primary grades. Pilonieta and Medina conducted a series of procedures to implement their version of reciprocal teaching in elementary school students (2009). The women adopted an age-appropriate model for reciprocal teaching and called it "Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades," or RTPG (2009). Their research shows that even in younger children, reciprocal teaching apparently benefited the students and they showed retention of the RTPG when re-tested 6 months later (2009).

Reciprocal teaching has been heralded as effective in helping students improve their reading ability in pre-post trials or research studies (Pearson & Doyle, 1987; Pressley et al., 1987) Further trials employing Reciprocal Teaching have consistently indicated the technique promotes reading comprehension as measured on standardized reading tests (Carter, 1997).