Reciprocal Teaching: Effects on EFL Students' Reading Comprehension and Challenges

This study investigated the effects of reciprocal teaching (using its basic reading strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying & summarizing) on EFL students' reading comprehension and the challenges that EFL teacher and students face during the intervention in a large class. Fifty-six grade 9 EFL students (intact group selected from ten sections using a lottery) at Bahir Dar City, Ethiopia, took the intervention for eight weeks. The reciprocal teaching instruction was delivered by the researcher in a whole class setting. Eight expository texts representing a range of topics which were selected from Grade 9 student textbook currently in use but were independent of the topics that have been covered earlier by their classroom teacher have been used for the intervention. The participants took pretest and post-test measures of reading comprehension passage. Paired samples t-test was used to compare group means of the two scores obtained (i.e., before-after intervention means). The results indicated that there was statistically a significant difference in students' reading comprehension after the reciprocal teaching intervention.