Post 142: Reciprocal Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction

Post 142: Reciprocal Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction

Reciprocal Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction is a four step method designed to improve reading comprehension in students who can decode, but who experience difficulty understanding the meaning of what they have read. The four steps  are 1) prediction  2) question generating 3) clarification and 4) summarizing. These four steps are similar to the Pre-reading, Reading and Post-reading method I posted earlier. (Ovando, 367)

I will go back to my Chinese student Zhen Ni, she was 13 years old from China. She came to the US to play music for my private school. I was her English teacher. Because she spoke no English, but only Chinese, I taught her English speaking, reading and writing in Chinese.  We used the Reciprocal Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction or the UCLA (Pre-Reading, Reading and Post-Reading) method of reading comprehension.

Reciprocal Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction

1. Teacher Reads.
2. Teacher Reads. Student helps.
3. Teacher and Student read together.
4. Student reads. Teacher helps.
5. Student reads.

We were reading in English and she looked at the Chinese on the other page for translation.  We used Chinese until she learned enough English to learn content on her own.---Goal of Bilingual Ed. Zhen Ni loved learning English with me!

1. Prediction--I taught Zhen Ni to look at the pictures of any story and tell me in Chinese what she thinks the story will be about. Then, I had Zhen Ni read slowly the title of the article/story and tell me in Chinese what the story title tells her about the main idea of the story.

2. Question-Generating--What is the story about? What do you think will happen next? I would then ask her all these questions in Chinese.  She could decode English reading slowly and understand slowly. She used her dictionary a lot when she encountered words she did not understand.

3. Clarification--When she came across a difficult concept or jargon, she would ask me what that jargon meant and once again, I would teach her about context clues and of course I taught her academic content in Chinese so she would not fall behind other students in her class.

4. Summarizing--I then would ask her in Chinese what she understood from the article. I would then ask her in Chinese, how would this be done in China? If you read this article when you were in school in China, how would it apply? She would tell me she used to read this slowly in China when she was in elementary school first learning her Chinese characters.

Ovando, Carlos.  Bilingual and ESL Classrooms. Teaching in Multicultural Contexts.

Because she had a lot of L1 literacy in Chinese, she was able to use her L1 literacy skills and apply it to learning her L2 English. This is why within 6 months to a year, she was able to read her first book entirely in English without needing translation. Once she reached an intermediate level of English, then I used the Natural Approach/Communicative Approach where I spoke to her only in the target language English so she could learn to associate words directly in English without cheating and going back to translation. Later, even when her English became fluent, she still liked to speak to me in Chinese because she was homesick. I am proud that Zhen Ni learned to read English so fast in a year.