Effect of Reciprocal Teaching on Reading Comprehension, Motivation and Engagement of VII Graders in the Subject of English

Abstract

One of the most significant cognitive abilities students developed during primary, elementary and secondary education is the reading comprehension. In fact, reading comprehension is needed in all subject areas throughout all levels of schooling and even in higher education. The existing literature argues that explicit reading strategies can improve the reading comprehension, reading motivation and reading engagement of students. This study is intended to investigate the effects of reciprocal teaching on the reading comprehension, reading motivation and reading engagement of the Grade 7 students. The study is quantitative in nature and one of the quasi-experimental designs known as ―Pretest-Posttest Nonequivalent Control Group Design‖ was used to meet the desired objectives. The sample of the study comprised of students of two intact classes of Grade 7 studying English in a public sector higher Secondary School for Girls. The public sector higher secondary school was conveniently selected from the district Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu and Kashmir. There were four sections of Grade 7 students in the selected higher secondary school identified as yellow, green, blue and white. The two groups were selected from the four sections with small initial difference on the pre-test scores for the experiment. The experimental and control groups were further randomly selected from these two groups. The experimental group was instructed through the reciprocal teaching, while the control group received instruction through traditional method. A Reading Comprehension Test (RCT) was developed and validated from expert with vast teaching experience in the subject. The item analysis was carried out to check the difficulty and discrimination level of the test. The test was then pilot tested to check its internal consistency. A final Reading Comprehension Test (RCT) which consisted of 30 items was used for pre-test and post-test to collect the data. A ii Reading Motivation Questionnaire (RMQ) was also used to collect the data for pretest and post-test. The confirmatory factor analysis was carried out to check the construct validity of RMQ through factor loading on different items and their statistical significance. The RMQ was pilot tested to check its internal consistency before administering. The Reading Engagement Checklist (REC) was used to assess the level of engagement of each student in the classroom. To eliminate inter-rater bias, all the observations on REC from students of both the experimental and control groups were to be made by same rater. The hypotheses were tested using the independent and paired sample t-tests. The Cohen‘s d was used to estimate the magnitude of treatment effect. The findings of the study reveal that reciprocal teaching practices have statistically significant positive effect on the Grade 7 students‘ reading comprehension in the subject of English. The results also show that reciprocal teaching strategy have statistically significant positive effect on the reading motivation of the selected students. Similarly, results also reveal that the students who were taught with reciprocal teaching strategy were more engaged readers as compare to the students who were taught with traditional grammar translation method. The results of study provide important implications for educators, students, and teachers training institutions. On the basis of the results, the study suggests that the teacher training institutions should incorporate the reciprocal teaching in the curriculum of different professional degree programs especially designed for teachers. It is also suggested that different workshops, seminars, and trainings on reciprocal teaching should be designed for educators so that teachers can implement reciprocal teaching in classroom practices.