Effects of reciprocal teaching on pre-university students' mastery of a literary text

Abstract

This study is a true experimental study that examined the effects of reciprocal teaching on Nigerian pre-university students’ mastery of an English literary text. The subjects were a class of 60 students (N = 60) who were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 30) and control groups (n = 30) via the matching of their pre-test scores. The treatment group studied the text using the reciprocal teaching techniques of predicting, summarizing, questioning and clarifying, while the control group was taught the same text using the traditional method. The subjects' mastery of the literary text was measured in terms of vocabulary, comprehension and recall using a self-developed test. The reliability of the measures ranged from a Cronbach's alpha of 0.60 to 0.80. Descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test were used to analyse the collected data. The overall results indicated that reciprocal teaching was effective in enhancing students’ mastery of the literary text where the treatment group exhibited a significant increase of 67.6 points. The effect size of the treatment was very large at Cohen’s d = 4.76. The study recommends that future researchers consider the effects of student variables, like motivation and attitudes, on the use of reciprocal teaching for text-based learning.