Reciprocal teaching evaluated: What effect does direct strategy instruction, following the reciprocal teaching framework, have on the reading comprehension of four struggling third year havo/vwo readers?

(1)

Reciprocal teaching evaluated

What effect does direct strategy instruction, following the reciprocal teaching

framework, have on the reading comprehension of four struggling third year

havo/vwo readers?

Jorien van der Woude

Studentnummer: 500249887 Master Engels

Begeleider: Desiree Verbeek & Margriet Heim 2013-2014

(2)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 2

Samenvatting

Zwakke lezers besteden onnodig veel tijd aan het herlezen van teksten en het woord voor woord vertalen van Engelse zinnen, waar sterke lezers gebruikmaken van strategieën om een tekst beter te begrijpen (Paris & Jacobs, 1984). Het herlezen en woord voor woord vertalen van zinnen leidt tot demotivatie en het groter worden van het gat tussen zwakke en sterke lezers in een klas. Het steeds verder achterblijven, zorgt voor steeds grotere achterstanden op leestoetsen tijdens de schoolcarriè-re van de leerlingen.

Aan dit onderzoek hebben vier zwakke lezers uit een 3 havo/vwoklas van OSG Helen Parkhurst deel-genomen. Deze leerlingen zijn geselecteerd aan de hand van eerdere toets- en citoresultaten. In dit onderzoek wordt onderzocht of directe-strategie-instructie invloed heeft op de leesvaardigheid van zwakke lezers. De directe-strategie-instructie wordt aangeboden volgens de reciprocal-teaching-methode (interactief leren) ontworpen door Palinscar en Brown (1984). Reciprocal-teaching is een leesinterventieprogramma dat onder andere directe instructie van vier leesstrategieën bevat. De vier strategieën die aangeboden worden, zijn: voorspellen, verhelderen, vragen stellen en samenvatten. Na de directe instructie van de docent over de strategieën en het gebruik daarvan, gaan de leerlingen in kleine groepen zelf verder met het lezen van Engelse teksten waarbij ze gebruik maken van de strategieën. Dit leidt tot scaffolded support, wat inhoudt dat de docent zijn of haar klassieke rol in een klas vermindert en steeds meer de rol van coach gaat aannemen. De interventie in dit onderzoek duurde tien weken. Het effect van de interventie is gemeten door een voor en na-test, twee inter-views en een open vragenlijst ter evaluatie van de interventie. Naast deze instrumenten is er ook nog audiomateriaal van drie lessen opgenomen dat geanalyseerd is aan de hand van terugkerende the-ma’s en patronen, gerelateerd aan strategiegebruik tijdens het groepsproces.

De resultaten tonen aan dat de directe-strategie-instructie bij de vier onderzochte leerlingen geleid heeft tot een toename van hun strategiegebruik en tot hogere scores voor leesbegrip. Het is aanne-melijk dat het verbeterde leesbegrip samenhangt met het toegenomen strategiegebruik. De conclu-sie van dit onderzoek luidt dan ook dat de directe-strategie-instructie effectief kan zijn bij verbetering van het leesbegrip. Onderzoek bij een grotere groep leerlingen is nodig om deze conclusie te bevesti-gen.

De uitkomsten van dit onderzoek zijn van belang voor het leesvaardigheidsonderwijs op OSG Helen Parkhurst en andere scholen.

(3)

Abstract

Four, third-year weak readers from OSG Helen Parkhurst, Almere have participated in this study. These students were chosen to participate because they struggle while reading English texts. These students tend to over-rely on decoding unknown words and keep re-reading certain passages when trying to comprehend a text. The aim of this research was to help these weak readers to better com-prehend an English text through the means of direct instruction following the reciprocal teaching framework. Reciprocal teaching is “where the tutor and students take turns leading a dialogue cen-tred on pertinent features of the text” (Palincsar & Brown, 1984, p. 117). This dialogue happens ac-cording to the use of four reading strategies; predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. O’Malley and Chamot (1990) state that these reading strategies are the special thoughts or behav-iours that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new information.

The intervention took place over ten weeks and was based on the reciprocal teaching method. This meant that the four reading strategies were first introduced through direct instruction by the teach-er. The second step for the students was to try to master these strategies while working in groups of four while the teacher decreased her role and became a coach throughout the process.

Four different instruments have been used to evaluate the effect of the intervention. A pre-and post-test, two interviews, three audio taped lessons and an evaluation questionnaire. The pre-test and post-test, adapted to the reciprocal teaching approach, and the interviews, served to find out to what extent students make use of the four reading strategies before and after instruction. The audio taped lessons have served as evidence of strategy use during the reciprocal teaching lessons. The post-test and the second interview indicate that there has been an increase of strategy use after the intervention. Students scored better during the post-reading test than they did during the pre-reading test. These results indicate that direct strategy instruction following the reciprocal teaching framework has led to an increased understanding of a specific text during this intervention. Further research with a larger experimental group is needed to confirm the conclusion that direct strategy instruction leads to increased text understanding.

The results of this research are of importance to the reading comprehension lessons at the partici-pating schools and possibly also for other schools.

(4)

1 Introduction

This research took place in 2014 at OSG Helen Parkhurst, a Dalton school in Almere, and focuses on reading skills. During the first two years of English lessons in havo/vwo, students became familiar with short reading assignments but there have not been any specific reading lessons. This means that students have not specifically been taught reading skills. In year three students start reading authen-tic and longer arauthen-ticles to prepare them for the higher years. At the end of year three students need to be able to read on level B1 of the common European framework of reference (CEFR). The gap be-tween the weak and strong readers becomes more apparent while reading these authentic and long-er texts. The weak readlong-ers, who not only struggle with the level of the texts but also with the lack of reading skills to tackle these texts, start to feel demotivated. This demotivated feeling and the lack of reading skills will continue to play a part in the higher years of havo/vwo as well, where the level of texts is only increasing.

In the fourth and fifth year in havo and four to six in vwo, students are preparing for their exams. This means that at the end of year three students need to have reached B1 level in order to go on to year four, and pass their exams in the following years. This is the main reason to focus on reading in the third year during this research. It seems that not only the gap between the weak and strong readers, but also between the third and fourth year needs to be bridged. In the English section of OSG Helen Parkhurst there have been discussions on this matter for a few years now and the teachers are trying to find a solution to get the weak readers on the right CEFR level at the end of year three.

One of the methods aimed at improving weak readers’ reading comprehension is reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching has been developed by Palinscar and Brown (1984) and involves direct instruc-tion of four reading strategies combined with the co-operainstruc-tion between students to master these strategies while reading. During this co-operation students discuss the text in groups of four and follow the same guidelines while reading a new text. The intervention in this research has been based on the expectation that direct instruction following the reciprocal teaching framework will improve student’s reading comprehension.

During the lessons set up according to this teaching method, four reading strategies will be intro-duced. These four strategies are; predicting, summarizing, questioning and clarifying. The use of these strategies should prepare the students for the higher years of havo/vwo, where reading is a focal point during the English lessons.

(7)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 7 The aim of this study is to find out whether reciprocal teaching as a didactic method will serve as a possible solution to improve the reading comprehension of four readers identified as weak before this research. The research question therefore was: What effect does direct strategy instruction, fol-lowing the reciprocal teaching framework, have on the reading comprehension of four struggling third year havo/vwo readers?

This research will first elaborate in chapter 2 on the problems weak readers encounter while reading a text in their second language (L2), followed by the selection process of the four participating stu-dents. Literature related to the teaching of reading comprehension can be found in chapter 3. A de-tailed description of the intervention used for this study will be discussed in chapter 4. Chapter 5 discusses the research method and the instruments used during this research. Finally the results will be presented and discussed in chapter 6 and 7. The practical implications of this research and impli-cations for further research will be discussed in chapter 8.

(8)

2 Problem definition

In the first two years of havo/vwo students of OSG Helen Parkhurst are taught English through the Realtime course books (Malmberg, 2012). From the third year on, we work with course books such as the Wasp Reporter (Thieme Meulenhoff, 2014). We use the Wasp Reporter for the third and fourth year of havo/vwo. The Wasp Reporter works with one, two, three and four star texts, these stars indicate the language level of the text. In the third year we only discuss the one and two star texts. This is the second year that I teach third and fourth year classes and I notice that students still strug-gle a lot during the reading lessons and reading comprehension tests, which can be seen in the dis-appointing reading results at the beginning of year three. The weaker readers struggle with a lack of vocabulary i.e. background knowledge and strategies on how to tackle a longer text in a second lan-guage. This was the main reason for me to find out whether reading comprehension can be improved through the direct instruction of reading strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching.

An important reason for this is that the knowledge gap between the second and third and fourth year is too big. With too big I mean that the students did a few reading assignments in the Realtime course books in the first two years, but not as intensively as in the Wasp Reporter in which the main focus of learning English is through reading. They have not been prepared during specific reading lessons in the first two years of their school career.

This gap does not encourage students to improve their reading comprehension. The stronger readers will manage but the weaker readers still need a lot of help from the teacher while reading. O’Malley and Chamot (1990) state that successful experiences in learning will help the student to build confi-dence. Students will therefore be more likely to use new learning strategies.

This works the other way around as well and that is the reason why I wanted to start working with these strategies in the third year so that students are less likely to get demotivated at the beginning of year four. If we are able to decrease these demotivated feelings successfully, students will be-come, as what Baker et al. (2000) call, ‘engaged readers’. Engagement refers to motivation, concep-tual knowledge, strategies and social interaction while reading. Baker et al.(2000) also state that there is a link between engagement and achievement which again links up to the confidence a stu-dent needs to have to be able to score well.

After having a look at a few different didactic reading methods I decided to work with ‘reciprocal teaching’ designed by Palinscar and Brown (1984). Bruer (1993) states that Reciprocal teaching helps

(9)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 9 novice readers learn and internalise the strategies excellent readers employ. In this research internal-isation is understood as the cognitive process of acquiring a skill or knowledge.

When engaging in Reciprocal teaching strategies, the novices are practicing and developing the skills required to comprehend and learn. This is not the only aspect why I chose to work with reciprocal teaching, I also feel this method will nicely fit into two of the ideals of Dalton education; one is the co-operation aspect where students will discuss a text in groups of four to five. There is one group leader who asks questions and keeps the discussion going. The leader and the rest of the group fol-low all the guidelines such as asking questions, clarifying and summarizing. The second ideal is reflec-tion; reciprocal teaching provides a framework for reflection in a group but also for individuals. Stu-dents are able to answer questions such as what was my role in the group process? Did I understand the text, what do I need to work on?

What I would like to achieve with reciprocal teaching is to let students work on their reading com-prehension in a ‘Dalton approved’ manner. This means that students are first introduced to the four reading strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching through direct instruction of the teacher. The sec-ond step is that students start working with the interactive part of reciprocal teaching. When stu-dents are working in their groups they take over the role of the teacher and learn to master these strategies individually through co-operation.

After this experiment I hope to have found out whether students have benefitted from this teaching method regarding reading comprehension. This could hopefully be seen in test results but also in the transcripts of the lessons and the interviews. I also hope that students will be able to explain whether this specific reading method will help them in the fourth year as well or that they choose to work by another method which might suit them better.

(10)

3 Theoretical framework

This chapter will provide a closer look to teaching reading in a second language but also to the differ-ent compondiffer-ents of reciprocal teaching (the use of reading strategies and metacognition, and working together in a group). It will also explain what weak readers exactly struggle with, and how reading strategies can help improve reading comprehension.

3.1 What is reading comprehension?

The main focus of this research is on improving reading comprehension through the use of strategies. Urquhart and Weir (1998) mention that reading is the process of receiving and interpreting infor-mation encoded in language form via the medium of print and that reading is more than only decod-ing (meandecod-ing transformdecod-ing printed words into spoken words). This decoddecod-ing is what the weaker readers tend to over-rely on while reading a L2 text.

A general conclusion which can be drawn from research on reading comprehension is that reading is built up out of different skills. Grabe (1991) mentions at least six different component skills in L2 reading:

1. Automatic recognition skills

2. Vocabulary and structural knowledge 3. Formal discourse structure knowledge 4. Content and world background knowledge 5. Synthesis and evaluation skills and strategies 6. Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring

These skills are elements a strong reader uses while reading a text. Since this research is based on reciprocal teaching which focuses on reading strategies I will primarily work on skills 4, 5 and 6. These are the meaning making components in reading comprehension.

As I mentioned before these are also the parts the weaker readers struggle with, the lack of vocabu-lary, that is background knowledge and strategies on how to tackle a text in L2.

According to Snow (2002) reading comprehension is based on three elements: 1. The reader who is doing the comprehending

2. The text that is to be comprehended

(11)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 11 These three elements can be subdivided into three constructive reading comprehension concepts: activation of prior knowledge (1), active engagement with the text (2), and strategic processing (3). This means that reading is more than decoding, the reader needs to be actively engaged as well. These three concepts are skills 4, 5 and 6 Grabe (1991) mentions.

Prior knowledge: strong readers make use of their knowledge about the world (Dole, Valencia, Greer, & Wardrop, 1991), they use the information they might already know about the subject they are reading about to try and figure out which meaning the author is trying to convey (Anderson & Pear-son, 1984). Even strong readers do not always have the right amount of prior knowledge, these readers then make use of the best available schema to construct a meaning of the text (Anderson & Pearson, 1984). Since every reader uses different schemas for different texts you can say that these schemas increase every time the reader is reading another text. Readers construct meaning through this activation of prior knowledge which means that reading is more than decoding and adding up a lot of words (Anderson, 1994).

Active engagement: after activating prior knowledge students need to be actively engaged with the text. According to Pressley and Afflerbach (1995) strong readers make use of different strategies and start reading with a purpose, they monitor their reading linked to their reading purposes. In their study Pressley and Afflerbach (1995) also found out that skilled readers stay engaged with the text before, during and after reading. Pressley and Wharton – McDonald (1997) support the statement that strong readers keep processing text information after reading the text. So skilled and active readers use different strategies and are therefore better comprehenders (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1995).

Strategic processing: strong readers are actively engaged with the text and make use of different strategies. Strategies are according to Trabasso & Bouchard (2002) specific, learned procedures that foster active, competent, self-regulated, and intentional reading.

These strategies need to be used in a flexible way to comprehend a text, a reader needs to be able to adjust the strategy he or she uses according to the text he or she is reading. According to Aebersold and Field (1997) monitoring strategies and the need to adjust reading strategies in L2 learning are important to raise awareness of text types, to make explicit the purposes for reading various types of texts, and to emphasize strategies appropriate for different texts.

So now we can link Snow’s (2002) elements; 1 The reader who is doing the comprehending, 2 the text that is to be comprehended, and 3 the activity in which comprehension is a part, to Grabe’s

(12)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 12 (1991) factors 4, 5 and 6 and to the three constructive reading comprehension concepts activation of prior knowledge (1), active engagement with the text (2), and strategic processing (3).

These elements form the basis of the intervention. It is expected that students’ reading comprehen-sion will increase through the use of these activities and active engagement with the text. In recipro-cal teaching are the four reading strategies the activities and is the active engagement with the text the co-operation aspect between students.

3.2 What are struggling readers?

Many teachers are concerned about the amount of struggling readers in a classroom. There may be several reasons why a student struggles with reading. Weaker readers can feel demotivated when they do not understand certain words and stop reading because they feel they will not understand the rest of the text without those words. This results in endlessly re-reading the specific passage. These students need help to reach the right level otherwise they will keep struggling for two or three more years and will be faced with difficulties during their reading exam.

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) makes use of different levels and that is how teachers are able to teach appropriate L2 or L3 levels in all school years. They have set goals for each level. The texts used in year three in the Wasp Reporter (Thieme Meulenhoff, 2014) are based on the B1 level of the Common European Framework. According to the CEFR year three students need to be at level B1 at the end of the year. In the ‘taalprofielen’ i.e. language profiles (Nationaal Bureau Mo-derne Vreemde Talen, 2004, p.43) I found the following information concerning finding information in longer articles. The language profiles describe what students need to be able to comprehend at level B1.

Goal 3. Reading to gain information

-Can understand factual information in articles

-Can understand main theme and most important arguments in plain texts in magazines, newspapers or on the internet (translation JvdW).

The goals the CEFR mentions are exactly the components weaker readers struggle with. They tend to focus on unknown words and difficult passages and therefore do not focus on comprehending the text or finding the main theme.

If we compare stronger readers to weaker readers we see that there is a difference in the reading method stronger readers and the weak readers use to comprehend a text in L2. Barnett (1989) found out in a study based on reading comprehension of L2 learners that the stronger readers first read the

(13)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 13 entire passage and then return to think about it and link this to what he or she already knows about the subject and then re-reads it. After re-reading the stronger readers think about what might come next (linked to what he or she already knows about the topic) and then guesses the meaning of un-known words from the context. The weaker and struggling readers pay a lot of attention on individu-al words, re-read difficult passages without thinking about what might come next or linking it to background knowledge, they also refuse to skip unknown words.

If we link the components Barnett (1989) mentions to reciprocal teaching we can see that the stronger readers make use of the following strategies; prediction, clarifying, and questioning. These three strategies plus summarizing are the ones reciprocal teaching works with and the strategies I want my weak readers to use during this intervention.

Paris and Jacobs (1984) provided an illustration of the differences between these strong and skilled readers and weak and unskilled readers:

“Skilled readers often engage in deliberate activities that require planful thinking, flexible strate-gies, and periodic self-monitoring. They think about the topic, look forward and backward in the passage, and check their own understanding as they read. Beginning readers or poor readers do not recruit and use these skills. Indeed, novice readers often seem oblivious to these strategies and the need to use them” (p. 283).

Weak readers therefore need more guidance in the use of reading strategies while trying to under-stand a text in L2, this direct strategy instruction is part of reciprocal teaching.

3.3 How do reading strategies improve reading comprehension?

Reading strategies help readers to “fix” problems they encounter during reading. Pressley and Af-flerbach (1995) state that strong readers start reading with a plan in mind, they know what they are reading and for which reason. They also state that strong readers have the knowledge about strate-gies and how to implement them when reading a text.

Brown and Palinscar (1984) also state the importance of reading strategies; when a strong reader encounters a difficulty (for instance an expectation which has not been confirmed or when unfamiliar concepts are encountered too frequently to still get the grasp of the text) he or she will make use of strategies such as slowing down and uses extra time to allocate the problem. Weak readers will not make deliberate use of strategies but these readers will for example start focussing on difficult words.

(14)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 14 Reading strategies are the special thoughts or behaviours that individuals use to help them compre-hend, learn, or retain new information according to O’Malley and Chamot (1990). As mentioned ear-lier, strong readers make use of summarizing, questioning and evaluating to comprehend a text. The use of reading strategies involves metacognitive activities and are therefore also referred to as meta-cognitive reading strategies (McLaughlin & Allen, 2002).

Metacognition is the ability to think about what is going on in your own mind (Nutall, 2005). Meta-cognition is used as a reflective tool, for instance to recognize that a student does not understand a text, find out why and adopt a strategy that will improve understanding (Nutall, 2005). Metacogni-tion is considered a key factor to develop as a reader, i.e. thinking about what is going on in your mind while reading happens while thinking aloud. This metacognition (thinking about your own learning and reflecting on it) is another process which is involved in reciprocal teaching. In the group discussions during the intervention students need to motivate their answers by explaining them to the rest of the group and in this way students gain insight into their own comprehension skills. Metacognition plays an important role in improving reading comprehension according to Paris and Jacobs (1984). They state that strong readers make use of their metacognition and in this way can work on their reading comprehension when they know which areas need improvement. Research has shown that weak readers tend to focus on reading as a decoding process rather than as a meaning-getting process (Baker & Brown, 1984). As a result they are less apt to use metacognitive strategies to improve their reading comprehension (Paris & Winograd, 1990).

3.4 Reciprocal teaching as a means to teach reading comprehension.

To sum it up reading comprehension of weak readers can be increased through the conscious use of reading strategies which helps improve the planful thinking students need while reading a text. But how do we get students to use these strategies?

In Dutch secondary education, reading is the major part of the English exam at the end of a students’ school career. Therefore we as teachers are required to invest a lot of time and effort on reading during our lessons. One thing that sometimes is lacking in a teacher’s teaching practice is a method for students to develop their reading comprehension.

Bimmel (2001) mentions that when the aim is to increase reading comprehension it is not sufficient to only focus on the ‘cognitive domain’, that is the execution of strategic reading activities. In this way students would only focus on performing a trick according to Bimmel (2001). Therefore students should also learn to indicate which strategies to use, how to use them and how to reflect upon the use of strategies, in other words how to use the metacognitive domain.

(15)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 15 This means that the teaching of these reading strategies on its own is not sufficient, students need to be able to use them in a flexible and context-sensitive way (Bimmel, 2001). Bimmel (2001) mentions that there are three components which can attribute to the effectiveness of reading strategy instruc-tion programmes:

1. Orientation;

2. Practice and application; 3. Awareness-raising;

The students themselves need to take the steps to lead them to a successful completion of the read-ing task and not the teacher (Westhoff, 1981). In reciprocal teachread-ing students work together in a group and take turns in the leadership role. Due to this group work they become aware of the use of strategies while reading together.

Reciprocal teaching was first mentioned by Brown and Palinscar (1984). In reciprocal teaching stu-dents focus on four reading strategies. These strategies are predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. Reciprocal Teaching (RT) is “where the tutor and students take turns leading a dia-logue centred on pertinent features of the text” (Palincsar & Brown, 1984, p. 117). Students who have difficulty reading can learn from their peers during reciprocal teaching.

Reciprocal teaching is based on two beliefs which have been thoroughly researched to increase read-ing comprehension, the first one is to make use of readread-ing strategies and the second one is the in-struction or teaching method to let students make use of these strategies. This is exactly what Bim-mel (2001) points out, increasing reading comprehension cannot only be increased when learning students a few strategies. They also need to learn how to implement them and need to be able to reflect on the use of these strategies (metacognition).

In reciprocal teaching the teacher provides the basics of the reading strategies for the students so that they can use these in groups later on. This process is based on Vygotsky’s (1978) scaffolding theory. Through scaffolding students need to become independent learners, the support of the teacher will gradually decrease. Through this way students need to be able to benefit from group work, which can be described as co-operative learning. Co-operative learning involves social strate-gies in which students work together in heterogeneous small groups towards a common goal (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990) .

In reciprocal teaching students constantly make a shift between cognitive and metacognitive activi-ties, this is also called self-regulated learning. Self-regulated learning emphasizes autonomy and

(16)

con-Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 16 trol by the individual who monitors, directs, and regulates actions toward goals of information acqui-sition, expanding expertise, and self-improvement” (Paris and Paris, 2001, p.89).

Zimmerman (1998) had based the self-regulation model on three types of self-reflective thoughts: (a) goal setting and strategic planning; (b) self-monitoring of one’s accuracy of implementing a selected strategy, and (c) self-assessment of strategy outcome and task performance.

In short reciprocal teaching aims to improve students’ reading comprehension through the direct instruction of four reading strategies, followed by the application of these strategies while reading and discussing a text in groups of four where the students need to be able to regulate their own learning. During this process the role of the teacher decreases.

3.5 Interactive school of reading

Reciprocal teaching involves both top-down and bottom-up reading which is also called the ‘interac-tive school’ of reading. The interac‘interac-tive school argues that both top-down and bottom-up learning occurs, either alternately or simultaneously (Aebersold and Field, 1997).

Aebersold and Field (1997) state that when using top-down learning, students need to bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations, assumptions and questions to the text. The predicting and sum-mary phases are based on top-down learning. According to Aebersold and Field (1997) students need to fit the text into knowledge (cultural, syntactic, linguistic, historical) they already possess, then check back when new or unexpected information appears. This checking back happens in the sum-mary phase, students are trying to sum up what happened in the paragraph or the entire text they discussed but also in the question phase where students can think of opinion questions (higher order thinking activity).

Clarifying happens when parts of the text are unclear to students, here students need to construct the text from the smallest units (letters to words to phrases to sentences, et cetera). This is exactly what bottom-up learning entails when the focus is on the text in order to reach understanding. (Aebersold and Field, 1997), However clarifying can also happen as a top-down activity since stu-dents are sometimes asked to look at the context of a word to find the meaning.

The question phase can also be considered as bottom-up learning but then as a lower order thinking activity, since students need to come up with questions and find answers in the text. The four read-ing strategies used in reciprocal teachread-ing are all linked to either top-down or bottom-up learnread-ing. Students might benefit from the fact that reciprocal teaching is based on more than one strategy. This means that this framework could cater for the several learning needs different students might have.

(17)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 17 Palinscar and Brown (1984) summarize the reasons why they have chosen for these specific four strategies in reciprocal teaching as follows: “These four strategies were selected because they pro-vide a dual function, that of enhancing comprehension and at the same time affording an opportuni-ty for the student to check whether it is occurring. That is, they can be both comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities if properly used” (p.121).

Not only Palinscar and Brown as the developers of reciprocal teaching see the importance of reading strategies. A lot of research has been done on the use of strategies in reading comprehension. Dole, Valencia, Greer, & Wardrop (1991) state that activating background knowledge (predicting) has an influence on increasing comprehension. Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag (1987) highlight the im-portance of summarizing text. Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman (1996) did research on generating questions to capture the main idea of text passages. Clarifying is needed when certain passages or words are unknown and the information must be evaluated against the prior knowledge the reader has to use (Block & Pressley, 2003).This means that students need to be able to solve the problem of encountering unknown words or passages to be able to comprehend the text.

The four strategies (predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing) are incorporated into the reciprocal teaching method. In short, where students work on during reciprocal teaching is predicting what the text is about, generating questions, clarify word meanings and difficult text passages, and from that they start predicting what might come next. After reading the text they are able to summa-rize what they have read. The main goal is to get the weaker readers to be able to comprehend a text individually after practising these four strategies with the teacher and in a group.

Another reason Palinscar and Brown (1984) name to focus on comprehension-fostering strategies is the fact that they also consist of knowledge-extending activities, the basic skills of argument (ques-tion and elaborate one’s own argument, thinking of counter-arguments). These skills are used by mature readers not only in reading but also while listening and debating.

3.6 Reciprocal teaching in L2

Chamot and O’Malley (1990) emphasize that co-operative learning in the second language classroom not only increases school task achievement and student’s attitude towards themselves and fellow students, but also meaningful opportunities for language practice. Spörer et al. (2008) evaluated the implementation of reciprocal teaching in German reading lessons and found that students benefitted from explicit reading instruction supplemented with practice in small groups’ reciprocal teaching activities. In a small amount of time students had become self-regulated readers.

(18)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 18 Cohen (1998) indicates the importance of the role of the teacher in strategy acquisition in L2 learn-ing. The teacher needs to be the learner’s trainer as well as a language instructor. In this way stu-dents can become the self-regulated readers Spörer et al. (2008) mention.

Williams and Moran (1989) warn that we must not overlook the word recognition and decoding in second language learning in the early stages (top-down learning). Reciprocal teaching combines both bottom-up and top-down learning as mentioned earlier, and in this way it fits well into the second language teaching curriculum.

Palinscar and Brown (1984) are aware that reciprocal teaching is based on two elements. Reciprocal teaching starts with the direct instruction of the four reading strategies and is followed by co-operative learning. Palinscar and Brown (1984) therefore recommend to try to first generate a gen-eralized effect and then continue to determine the subcomponents that are primarily responsible for the improvement. This study will therefore only focus on the use of strategies and analyse whether direct strategy instruction following the reciprocal teaching framework has an influence on reading comprehension.

3.7 Conceptual model

Figure 1 shows the connections between the main concepts derived from the research question. The participants of this research are four struggling readers in a third year havo/vwo class. These stu-dents will first be introduced to the four reading strategies through the means of direct instruction. After these introductory lessons students are going to work in groups of four according to the recip-rocal teaching method which means that the role of the teacher is decreasing. The teacher becomes a sympathetic coach to support the scaffolding process while students are working in their groups. After scaffolding has taken place students not only need to be able to reflect on their use of strate-gies while reading a text, but also to explain how these stratestrate-gies might have helped them to better comprehend the text. The ability to reflect on your own thinking is what is called metacognition (Nu-tall, 2005). When using these strategies reading comprehension should improve.

Figure 1: Conceptual model of reciprocal teaching leading to increased reading comprehension through strategy use. Reciprocal teaching reading strategies Strategy use - predicting - questioning - clarifying - summarizing Reading comprehension

(19)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 19 3.8 Research question

What effect does direct strategy instruction, following the reciprocal teaching framework, have on the reading comprehension of four struggling third year havo/vwo readers?

The sub-questions which belong to this question are:

- To what extent do students make use of strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching before and after instruction?

- How do students make use of the four strategies while reading during the intervention? - What is the relationship between strategy use and reading comprehension?

The qualitative and quantitative data collected might show if students have started to use more strategies after the intervention and whether this has helped them to better comprehend a specific text given to them as a post-test.

3.9 Summary of main concepts

This section is a short summary of the theoretical framework and highlights the main concepts used in this research.

Reading strategy = The steps readers use to comprehend a text and learn or retain new information. The reading strategies used in this research are: predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing. Strategy acquisition and internalisation = A student’s level of control or mastery of a particular com-prehension strategy.

Reading comprehension = Level of understanding of a text. Reading is not only decoding words, it also involves a meaning making process. This means that students need to be actively engaged with the text and integrate their own feelings and background knowledge. Reading comprehension can be trained and developed through the use of reading strategies.

Direct Strategy Instruction = Instructional technique which explains the use of reading strategies ex-plicitly. The teacher models how, when and why to apply a particular strategy to the text at hand. Reciprocal teaching = Instructional strategy which entails the teaching of four reading strategies (predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing) through direct instruction, and cooperative learning. Reciprocal teaching aims to improve reading comprehension. The strategies and their use are first explained by the teacher. After this instruction each student in the group acts as the teacher and goes through the strategies in turn. The students predict what information the entire text and the next paragraph or section will present, they will then continue to summarize what has been read, identify and clarify difficult parts and ask group members questions related to comprehension of the text.

(20)

Metacognition = The awareness of one’s own thinking. In this study metacognition involves the awareness of how, when and why to use a particular strategy.

Scaffolded support = Gradual release of teacher support so that students have to practice the use of strategies individually with the teacher as a guide.

(21)

4 Intervention

This chapter will explain what the intervention looked like, the procedure and implementation of the intervention and the criteria which it needed to comply with.

4.1 Criteria

The intervention needed to be based on the four reading strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching: predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing. Students also needed to be placed in groups to be able to work according to the reciprocal teaching method.

4.2 The design process

The intervention of this research has been done according to the reciprocal teaching method. As described earlier this method has been created by Palinscar and Brown (1984). This means that the design and requirements for the intervention were already there.

After analysing 19 different studies on reciprocal teaching Rosenshine and Meister (1993) noticed that over the years researchers made use of two different approaches to introduce reciprocal teach-ing in a classroom. RTO is reciprocal teachteach-ing only, this is the first approach. RTO means that there is no explicit instruction on the individual strategies before the reciprocal teaching group reading ses-sions. The teacher will make use of prompts and cues during the dialogues. Explicit Teaching Before Reciprocal Teaching (ET/RT) is the second approach in which instruction about the reading strategies was provided before the reciprocal teaching group reading sessions began.

For this research I chose to work according to the ET/RT approach because my third year students have already gained a lot of independency during the past few years at a Dalton School and have therefore proven that they can start working in groups with little guidance from the teacher in an early stage of the intervention. ET/RT was also the better option considering the limited time for this intervention. This means that I first started explaining about reciprocal teaching and its four reading strategies and that the students then started reading texts in groups of four according to the recipro-cal teaching method.

4.3 Procedure of intervention

The intervention was based on ten lessons which started at the end of March 2014 until the begin-ning of June 2014. The entire class of D3C1, where the selected students belonged to, participated in the intervention. This meant that the selected students did not have a special status. For the analysis and the purpose of this study only the data of the four selected weak readers have been taken into account.

(22)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 22 The first two sessions were the introductory lessons in reciprocal teaching. In these lessons the direct instruction of the four reading strategies took place. The explicit teaching of the four strategies (pre-dicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing) in the lesson plans and therefore the intervention, was aimed at introducing the students to the strategies and vocabulary they needed to be able to work with during reciprocal teaching. Questions about reciprocal teaching such as: what is it, what does it entail and which strategies are we going to work with were being answered in these lessons. After this general introduction I made sure that students know what they needed to do while they were working in groups, in other words I explained what each strategy entailed. I explained that eve-ry student had a different role in the process. As the sessions continue, students in the group contin-ue to take on more responsibility for carrying out the dialogcontin-ue. Later on the teacher becomes a sym-pathetic coach during the reading process. The following lesson plan will show what has been done during these two lessons as an introduction to reciprocal teaching. The same lesson plan is the for-mat the students made use of during the rest of the reciprocal teaching lessons in their own reading group.

4.4 Lesson plan and reciprocal teaching format

I started by explaining that there is a group leader, whom will lead the discussion and who keeps an eye on the time, the rest of the group will use the four different strategies while discussing texts. The following materials were used during the introductory lessons and later on in the reciprocal teaching groups.

The first strategy students started with is predicting. In this predicting phase students made use of the chart in table 1. Later on students also made use of “logical wonders” before reading, based on clues from the text.

After reading students will be able to answer the “logical wonders”. “I wonder...”

(23)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 23 Table 1: Predicting worksheet.

Before reading

(what do you think this text is about)

After Reading

(fill in what actually happened)

Setting: Setting:

Who or what is the text about: Who or what is the text about:

Problem: Problem:

Main Events: Main Events:

Resolution/ending: Resolution/ending:

Source: Adapted from Hammond (1991). Prediction chart for reciprocal teaching. In Macon, Bewell, & Vogt, Responses to literature: Grades K–8 (pp. 11–12). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Adapted by Jorien van der Woude to function for non-fiction texts as well.

The second strategy students worked with was questioning. This also meant that the second step was to actually start reading and ask questions while reading. During the two introductory lessons I asked questions using prompts and made sure that students themselves asked questions about the text as well. While students worked in groups students asked questions in the group they are work-ing with. Durwork-ing the two introductory lessons students were introduced to the difference between higher and lower order thinking questions. Students needed to be able to spot the difference be-tween clarifying questions and in depth questions about the meaning of the text. Table 2 shows the difference between higher and lower order questions as given to students.

Table 2: Difference between higher and lower order questions.

Lower order Higher order

- Answers are stated in the text.

- Answers tell what happened or what was said. - Answers retell main details.

- Answers explain who, what, when and where.

- Answers can be strongly implied – find the clues. - Answers can be inferred – use background

knowledge or research.

- Answers can be opinions – defend them. - Answers explain why and how.

Source: Action Learning Systems Inc.http://www.actionlearningsystems.com/cart/product.asp?intProdID=1017 Retrieved September, 18th_{, 2013.}

(24)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 24 The third strategy is clarifying, step 2 and 3 can be discussed in any order. Students discussed the passages which were unclear to them, first with the entire group, later on in their own reading group. It depends on how the group is reading (aloud, paragraph, silent reading) how the group deals with the parts which need to be clarified. The group leader will discuss this with the group.

When clarifying, students use the language of clarifying:

I didn’t get _____(confusion), so I _____(strategy used to repair comprehension).

Oczkus (2005) explains that students need to identify words that are difficult to pronounce or stand during reciprocal teaching group sessions. They need to use a variety of strategies to under-stand the words, including finding “chunks” of words they already know, sounding out the words, using syllables, and rereading. After that they need to be able to tell how they clarified a difficult word. Students also need to identify sentences, pages, or ideas that need clarifying.

The final stage of a reciprocal teaching lesson is summarizing. According to Oczkus (2005) summariz-ing entails the followsummariz-ing:

When summarizing, students use the language of summarizing, you can motivate this by an-swering the following questions.

• This part is about...

• The most important ideas in this text are...

-reread to summarize main events or important ideas from the text. -include only main events or important ideas.

-tell main events or important ideas in order. -use some vocabulary from the text.

Table 3 shows the bookmark which students were given during the introductory lesson. The book-mark is a summary of the four strategies and might help students remember the steps they need to take during their group sessions.

(25)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 25 Table 3: Reciprocal teaching bookmark.

Be the teacher bookmark

Predict

Use clues from the text or illustrations to predict what will happen next. I think...because...

I’ll bet...because... I suppose...because... I think I will learn...because...

Question

Ask questions as you read.

Ask some questions that have answers in the text.

Use the question words who, what, where, when, why, how, and what if. Try asking some questions that can be inferred. Use clues from the text plus your experiences.

Clarify

How can you figure out a difficult word or idea in the text? Reread, reread, reread!

Think about word chunks you know. Try sounding it out.

Read on.

Ask, Does it make sense? Talk to a friend.

Summarize

Using your own words, tell the main ideas from the text in order. This text is about... This part is about...

In the second introductory lesson students started reading and discussing a new text from the WASP reporter. Since this was still an introductory lesson students were told when to start with each phase. In that way I made sure that the groups have worked on the four strategies in one lesson. After each phase I asked the groups to reflect on the strategy that they had just been working on and whether they had faced any difficulties.

After these two introductory lessons students worked with reciprocal teaching in groups of four for six lessons. The actual reciprocal teaching intervention therefore existed of six times 70 minutes. The last two lessons of the in total ten lessons were meant to gather data.

4.5 Implementation of intervention

Table 4 presents a short logbook about the intervention sessions. Three sessions of the weaker read-ers were audio taped and transcribed. The transcriptions can be found in appendix 6.

(26)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 26 Since this intervention took place in ten weeks’ time I noticed that almost at the end of the ten weeks I started to diminish my role as a teacher and became a ‘coach’. In the first few weeks I no-ticed that not all steps were being done as accurately as meant in reciprocal teaching. This means that I sometimes needed to take the students by hand during the first few weeks. This meant that I supported the students by giving them more guidance and instructions while working with the strat-egies. While writing the research plan I thought that this scaffolding aspect would take place earlier on.

Table 4: Logbook intervention lessons.

Number of session Aim Logbook

1 (24-28 Mar) First interviews and introduction to strate-gies

Students at first found it hard to read aloud during the interview but this slowly decreased during the intervention.

Transcripts can be found in the appendices

The first introductory lesson went well. The one thing which needed a bit more explaining was the questioning phase, at first students thought this meant that they had to answer the question in their assignment book, while they actually needed to ask questions themselves about the text.

2 (31 Mar-4 Apr) Semi-independent read-ing with help of teacher and prompts.

Teacher led students step by step through reciprocal teaching program. Some students found it difficult to start reading aloud in a group, I then let a strong-er readstrong-er start so that they could start talking about the text and have a basic understanding.

3 (7-11 Apr) Intervention session 1 Transcripts can be found in appendices. I noticed that students still found the questioning phase hard to do, especially the difference between lower and higher order questions.

4 (14 –18 Apr) Intervention session 2 Before starting I paid attention to questioning, explained it again and stopped students every once in a while to share a few questions with the entire class. By doing this students could answer each other’s questions and check their understanding of the text. Here I also noticed that students did not come back to their prediction as explained in the predicting worksheet.

5 (5-9 May) Intervention session 3 Before starting I let students have a look at the prediction worksheet and made sure they came back to their prediction after finishing their text. This was done with the entire group so that students could hear each other’s pre-dictions and on what arguments they were based.

6 (12-16 May) Intervention session 4 Transcripts can be found in appendices.

Before starting, a short recap of what we did the past few weeks was done to make sure students followed all the steps of reciprocal teaching during this session, I did not ask the class what they did but I just wandered around and checked on their progress.

7 (19-23 May) Intervention session 5 This was the first session where I let the students take over my role and made myself a coach and helped where necessary, but did not intervene in the groups.

8 (26-30 May) Intervention session 6 Transcripts can be found in appendices 9 (2-6 Jun) Post-test Results can be found in chapter 6

(27)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 27 Looking back at the intervention I thought to could have given the students more independence ear-lier on. It turned out that students needed to have more guidance in internalising the strategies. While walking around and keeping an eye on the progress I found out that he use of the strategies was sometimes not clear to the students. A positive thing was that students stood open to sugges-tions and were able to improve themselves. The following chapter will explain in more detail what the intervention looked like and which instruments were used to gather data on strategy use and improving reading comprehension.

(28)

5 Research method

This chapter will discuss the research model of this study. Apart from the research questions this chapter will give an explanation of the instruments, participants, data collection, and analysis used during this research.

5.1 Design

This research tests a specific teaching method namely reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching is a didactic method, which aims to improve students’ text understanding through the use of strategies. Reciprocal teaching will be the basis of the intervention. The research evaluates the effect of direct strategy instruction following the reciprocal teaching framework on weak readers’ reading compre-hension. The effects have been measured through four different instruments (pre- and post-tests of reading comprehension, interviews, transcripts of recorded lessons and an evaluation questionnaire). This research has been based on a mixed method, which means that both qualitative and quantita-tive data have been collected. The four different instruments will be discussed in more detail in sec-tion 5.4. When referring to reciprocal teaching I will from now on mean both elements; that is the direct instruction of reading strategies and the co-operation between students when trying to inter-nalise these strategies.

5.2 Research questions

The objective of the intervention was to find out whether direct strategy instruction following the reciprocal teaching framework has an effect on the reading comprehension of weak readers. To evaluate the hypothesis that reciprocal teaching increases students’ reading comprehension the fol-lowing research question functioned as an essential guiding question throughout the intervention: What effect does direct strategy instruction, following the reciprocal teaching framework, have on the reading comprehension of four struggling third year havo/vwo readers?

The sub-questions which belong to this question are:

1) To what extent do students make use of strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching before and after instruction?

2) How do students make use of the four strategies while reading during the intervention? 3) What is the relationship between strategy use and reading comprehension?

5.3 Participants

For this research the data of four weak readers have been collected and analysed. The reason to work with weak readers in this study is that if these students not strategically try to improve their reading comprehension they will most likely have difficulty passing their English exam in their final

(29)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 29 year. Another reason to focus on weak readers in this study is that reciprocal teaching aims to im-prove students’ reading comprehension through the use of strategies. What makes strong readers is the internalisation of reading strategies. Internalisation of the reading strategies is the not only the awareness of the strategies but also being able to use them in the correct manner. The internalisa-tion of reading strategies is what weak readers lack and will therefore be addressed in this study (Paris & Jacobs, 1984).

Palinscar and Brown (1984) advise to make use of groups of four for the reciprocal teaching method, I have therefore selected four weak readers from class D3C1 (3 havo/vwo). The students were se-lected after analysing the results of two tests: the pre-test based on the reciprocal teaching method and part of the intervention and the CITO English reading test all third year students at OSG Helen Parkhurst did at the beginning of this year.

The students who scored a 5.5 or lower on the pre-test (five students) were in the first selection, these results were later compared to the CITO reading test and from there narrowed down to a se-lection of four students. The results of the CITO test were expressed in percentages on both havo and vwo level. A 100% score being the highest obtainable score and 0% the lowest. The four selected students all scored below 25% on vwo and three of the four selected students scored below 35% on havo based on the CITO results.

Since I have not only been teaching this class for three years now but I have also been the class’ tu-tor, I already had a clear idea of which students struggle with reading. These students do not only struggle with reading during the English lessons but also in French, German and or Dutch. The weaker readers struggle with a lack of vocabulary that is background knowledge, and strategies on how to tackle a longer text in a second language. For the selected weaker readers this results in focussing too much on unknown words and re-reading certain passages in order to better comprehend a text. I hope that after learning about the four reading strategies in reciprocal teaching, students will be able to move away from the feeling that they need to know every single word to understand a text. The group of selected students consists of three girls and one boy; Student 1(f), Student 2(m), Stu-dent 3 (f) and StuStu-dent 4 (f). All stuStu-dents have a Dutch background and therefore use Dutch as their L1. Students were all 15 years old when participating in this experiment. All students were eager to participate in the experiment and expressed that they wanted to try to improve their reading com-prehension. In other words students realised that they were weak readers and saw the need to im-prove their reading comprehension in order to pass their exams in a few years’ time.

(30)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 30 5.4 Instruments

Table 5 shows an overview of the different instruments used in this research and which purpose they served and how they answered the research questions. The section below table 5 will explain the instruments used in more depth.

Table 5: Overview of data collection and instruments used to find relationship between strategy use and reading com-prehension.

Research question Instruments Aim Phase Quantitative /

qualitative To what extent do

stu-dent(s) make use of strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching before instruction and after?

Pre - test To establish baseline data relative to strategy use and reading com-prehension

Before instruction Both

First MPIR interview (see app. 2)

Rubric scores on strate-gy use + patterns of strategy awareness

Before instruction Both

To what extent do stu-dent(s) make use of strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching before instruction and after?

Post –test To establish post – test data relative to strategy use and reading com-prehension

After instruction Both

Second MPIR interview (see app. 2)

Rubric scores on strate-gy use + patterns of strategy awareness and use

How do students make use of the four strate-gies while reading dur-ing the intervention?

Transcripts audio tapes lessons 1, 2 and 3

To examine patterns of discourse relative to strategy awareness and use

After instruction Qualitative

Evaluation question-naire

Open questions to eval-uate students’ opinions about the use and use-fulness of reading strat-egies

After instruction Qualitative

What is the relationship between strategy use and reading compre-hension?

Pre – and post test To identify relationship between strategy use and reading compre-hension

From these results a conclusion will be drawn to answer the main research question; What effect does direct strategy instruction, following the reciprocal teaching framework, have on the reading comprehension of struggling third year havo/vwo readers?

The following four instruments have been used during this experiment. The instruments will be dis-cussed in the order of the sub-questions.

5.4.1 Pre-and post-test reading

The pre-and post-test reading helped answer the first sub-question; To what extent do student(s) make use of strategies as meant in reciprocal teaching before instruction and after?

(31)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 31 The pre–test served as a baseline measurement. In year three students will have to do three reading tests, one per trimester. These tests are provided by the Wasp Reporter (Thieme Meulenhoff, 2014) and are reading tests based on an article of the Wasp Reporter. To examine reading comprehension students have to read the article and answer multiple choice and open questions about the text they have just read. The first test, which served as a basis for the pre-test, consisted of 12 questions. The basis of these reading tests are multiple choice questions, there were 4 open questions in the original reading test. The post-test consisted of 13 questions, 10 multiple choice and 3 open questions. The original test will make up the mark on the report cards of the students, this is also the mark the third year groups who do not participate in this research get. This reading mark will help answer the third research question; what is the relationship between strategy use and reading comprehension? These marks will later be discussed in chapter 6. The mark, based on the norm provided by the Wasp Re-porter (Thieme Meulenhoff, 2014), students get served as the first scoring system for the pre–and post-test. The second scoring system can be found in table 6.

Five open questions were added to these original tests provided by the Wasp Reporter (Thieme Meu-lenhoff, 2014) so that the tests were ‘reciprocal teaching proof’, which means that all four strategies are being dealt with in the tests. The added questions functioned as a check to see to what extent students make use of the strategies discussed in reciprocal teaching. Table 6 shows the scoring sys-tem of the added questions.The fifth question had a didactic aim. Students had to reflect on their initial prediction after reading the text. This question has therefore not been added in the scoring system. The basis of the added questions was the same in the pre-and post-test and can be found in table 6. This meant that the same added questions have been used in both tests with slight alteration of the gist of the next text. Students could score up to 9 points in total. The complete answer models to these added questions can be found in appendix 1.

(32)

Jorien van der Woude / 31 augustus 2014 32 Table 6: Scoring system pre-and post-test.

Question on strategy Maximum score Question Scoring system

Predicting 2 Write down in three

sentences where you think the text is about.

1 Prediction in keywords and no argumentation.

2 Prediction in full sentences with accurate argumentation.

Questioning 2 Pre-test: ‘ My parents

decided to tell me grad-ually’ (line 53) & ‘ They’d wanted to wait until I was 18’(line 74). Did this decision have a positive or negative effect on Katie’s life? (max. 75 words)

Post-test: Give an argu-ment (ll. 49-91) of someone who is in favor of an ‘Alliance school and someone who is against it (max. 100 words).

1 Too many words, elements are missing.

2 Enough words, all elements are mentioned.

Clarifying 2 In your own words

ex-plain why……. (maximum amount of words)

1 Too many words, elements are missing.

2 Enough words, all elements are mentioned.

Summarizing 3 The text is divided into

sections. What are the main topics? Write down in one or two short sentences what each section is about.

Per sub-heading short

sum-mary in one or two sentences. 5 = 3

4=2 3=1 2=0 1=0

5.4.2 Major Point Interview Readers

In order to fully answer the first sub-question the first Major Point Interview Readers (MPIR) de-signed by Keene & Zimmerman, (1997) has been used. The MPIR has been adapted by Diehl, (2005) according to the four reading strategies used in reciprocal teaching. The interview has been tested on a weak reader from another three havo/vwo group before carrying out the interviews with the se-lected weak readers in order to ensure reliability of this instrument. The MPIR interviews provided both quantitative and qualitative data.

The aim of the use of these interviews was to gain insight into students’ strategy use before and after the intervention. These interviews were done individually with the selected students. Students had to read a text aloud and stop periodically to discuss their thoughts related to meaning, as well as thoughts tied directly to the four reading strategies.

Reciprocal teaching evaluated: What effect does direct strategy instruction, following the reciprocal teaching framework, have on the reading comprehension of four struggling third year havo/vwo readers?