Many students in secondary education struggle with reading comprehension (e.g., Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2003). Since reading comprehension is a fundamental skill in many school subjects, problems with this skill have serious implications for students’ educational success and, consequently, for their later societal careers. Evidence-based reading comprehension programs that target low achieving adolescents are thus of vital importance. In this study, we analyze the effects of a reading strategy intervention based on principles of reciprocal teaching as introduced by Palincsar and Brown (1984). We examined its effects in the everyday practice of language teachers, teaching low achieving adolescents in secondary schools in The Netherlands, and we analyzed the roles of students’ vocabulary and metacognitive knowledge.

Reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) is a widely used method of instructing, teaching and guiding learners in reading comprehension. It consists of a set of three learning conditions: a) teaching comprehension-fostering reading strategies; b) expert modeling, scaffolding and fading; and c) students practicing reading strategies together with other students, guided and coached by the teacher. The gradual shift of responsibility includes the teacher explicitly modeling the use of reading strategies during the start of reciprocal teaching (Rosenhine & Meister, 1994) as well as scaffolding the application of reading strategies within the groups of students working together. During this process, students become increasingly more capable of regulating their own reading process and the role of the teacher gradually fades. Four types of reading strategies are normally taught: predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying.

Reading strategies can be defined as “deliberate, goal-directed attempts to control and modify the reader’s efforts to decode text, understand words, and construct meanings of text” (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008: 368). Researchers have suggested many different strategies (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). What these strategies have in common is that they involve an awareness of reading goals, the activation of relevant background knowledge, the allocation of attention to major content while ignoring irrelevant details, the evaluation of the validity of text content, comprehension monitoring, and making and testing interpretations, predictions, and conclusions (Palincsar & Brown, 1984).  

Both vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive knowledge can be seen as important components of reading comprehension, and, therefore, likely factors in the success of reciprocal teaching.  One might argue that a certain level of both vocabulary- and metacognitive knowledge is a prerequisite for a successful implementation of reciprocal teaching. In an intervention study by Spörer, Brunstein and Kieschke (2009), no effect of the reading strategy clarification was found. They assessed clarification by asking students which words or concepts in a text needed clarification. This suggests that a certain level of vocabulary knowledge might be needed to apply those strategies. As for metacognitive knowledge, Trapman et al. (2012), for example, found that metacognitive knowledge significantly predicted low achievers’ reading comprehension in Grade 7. In addition, metacognition may play a crucial role in the application of reading strategies. In order to apply reading strategies adequately, one needs to be aware of one’s cognitive resources, the demands reading tasks pose, and the strategies available for enhancing comprehension (Flavell, 1979; Baker & Brown, 1980).

In this contribution, we present the outcomes of a randomized experiment in which we examined the effects of the intervention on students’ reading comprehension ability. Additionally, we examined to what extent vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive knowledge moderated the effects of the intervention.

Afflerbach, P., Pearson, P.D., & Paris, S.G. (2008). Clarifying differences between reading skills and reading strategies. Reading Teacher, 61, 364-373. Baker, L., & Brown, A. L. (1980). Metacognitive skills and reading. Technical report no. 188. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois. Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911. Hacker, D. J. & Tenent, A. (2002). Implementing reciprocal teaching in the classroom: Overcoming obstacles and making modifications. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 699-718 Hazenberg, S., & Hulstijn, J. H. (1996). Defining a minimal receptive second-language vocabulary for non-native university students: An empirical investigation. Applied Linguistics, 17, 145-163. Hox, J. J. (2010). Multilevel analysis: Techniques and applications. Second Edition. New York: Routledge. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] (2003). The PISA 2003 assessment framework: Mathematics, reading, science and problem solving knowledge and skills. Paris: OECD. Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1, 117-175. Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Rasbash, J., Steele, F., Browne, W. J., & Goldstein, H. (2009). A user’s guide to MlwiN. Version 2.10. Bristol: University of Bristol, Centre for Multilevel Modelling. Raven, J., Raven, J.C., & Court, J.H. (1998). Manual for Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales. Section 1: General Overview. San Antonio, TX: Harcourt Assessment. Rosenshine, B., & Meister, C. (1994). Reciprocal teaching: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 64, 4, 479-530. Spörer, N., Brunstein, J.C., & Kieschke, U. (2009). Improving students’ reading comprehension skills: effects of strategy instruction and reciprocal teaching. Learning and Instruction, 19, 272-286. Trapman, M., Van Gelderen, A., Van Steensel, R, Hulstijn, J., & Van Schooten, E. (2012). Linguistic knowledge, fluency and meta-cognitive knowledge as components of reading comprehension in adolescent low achievers: Differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. Journal of Research in Reading, 0(0), 1-19. Van Steensel, R., Oostdam, R., & Van Gelderen, A. (2013). Assessing reading comprehension in adolescent low achievers: subskills identification and task specificity. Language Testing, 30(1), 3-21.