The effect of using Reciprocal Teaching on Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Size

Reciprocal teaching is an important strategy to improve reading comprehension performance. It has four strategies which are predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing. The preliminary study examined the reading comprehension and vocabulary size of secondary school students taught using Reciprocal Teaching procedure. The study was conducted on 45 students in a secondary school in Miri, Sarawak: 30 students in the experimental group and 15 in the control group. The experimental group was taught using the Reciprocal Teaching Procedure and the control group was taught using usual reading comprehension instructional techniques. A reading comprehension test focusing on predicting skills was given before the teaching, and another test focusing on summarizing, clarification and questioning skills was given after the teaching. Nation Vocabulary Size Test (2012) was used to measure their vocabulary size after the teaching. The scores of the control and experimental groups were similar for the pre-test comprehension questions focusing on predicting skills and the post-test questions focusing on clarifying, summarizing and questioning skills. Both groups were more familiar with words at the K2 (2,000-word) level but there is no relationship between the vocabulary size and post-test reading comprehension scores. The brief exposure to the reciprocal teaching procedure may be too short to make an impact.