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The Reciprocal Teaching Primary Reading StrategyIncrease Elementary School Students' Comprehension & Decoding Skills
The four parts of the reciprocal teaching reading strategy teach elementary students to comprehend and decode text by predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing.
Elementary school students need to be taught clear, step by step comprehension and decoding strategies to be successful readers. They need to learn how to attack text and make sense of what they are reading. Reciprocal teaching is a four part strategy that students can use to help them understand storybooks and textbooks written at their reading level. Teachers teach each part of the strategy to the students and then verbally prompt them to use the strategy while reading. The Predicting Reading Comprehension StrategyPredicting is using the author’s clues to make a hypothesis, or educated guess, about what is going happen in the story. The clues the author provides to the readers are the title, the illustrations, and the text that they have already read. Teachers instruct the students how to look for the author’s clues before they read and to use the clues to make a prediction. Students are asked to explain the reasoning behind their predictions and to revise their predictions as they gain new information in the story. The Clarifying Reading Decoding StrategyWhen most students come across a word they don’t know, they sound it out letter by letter. A more successful strategy is for the students to look for the biggest chunks, or word parts, they recognize in the word and to put them all together. For example, they would identify the cat, ch, and ing chunks in the word catching instead of sounding out every letter. Using this strategy, students are able to more quickly decode unknown words and make better sense of the story. The Questioning Reading Comprehension StrategyTo remember and understand information they read, students need to interact with the story. Having students generate teacher-like questions about what they have read is an effective way for them to interact with and comprehend text. Teachers teach students the six question words who, what, where, when, why, and how and then model how to use these words to come up with questions. Students can use their teacher-like questions to quiz each other, construct a study guide, or to create a class test. The Summarizing Reading Comprehension StrategyAnother way for students to interact with the story is for them to summarize what they have read. Students are taught how to identify the main idea of the story and to use the main idea to recap their reading. One way to teach young students to summarize is to give them a certain number of coins and tell them they need to pay for each word they use to tell what the story was about. For example, if they are given ten coins they must summarize the story in ten words or less. This helps students to focus on the key information instead of less important details. Teachers can use the reciprocal teaching reading strategy as a reading intervention for students who are struggling with reading or as a whole class lesson for beginning readers. After learning how to predict, clarify, question, and summarize, all students will become more effective and self-sufficient readers.
The copyright of the article The Reciprocal Teaching Primary Reading Strategy in Primary School Curriculum is owned by Megan Sheakoski. Permission to republish The Reciprocal Teaching Primary Reading Strategy in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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