The Effects Of Reciprocal Teaching On Students’ English Reading Comprehension And Reading Self-Efficacy In Junior High School

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 edition)proposes the requirements for students’ reading strategies from junior high school,that is,students will be able to use appropriate reading strategies according to their reading purpose.Reciprocal teaching refers to an instructional method in which an adult teacher and a group of students take turns leading a dialogue to reveal the text’s meaning.During this dialogue,the assigned teacher(adult or student)summarizes the content,asks questions concerning the gist,clarifies misunderstandings,and attempts to predict future content(Palincsar & Brown,1985).Reciprocal teaching has been proven in many aspects as a teaching method to improve English reading comprehension effectively.The new curriculum concept also emphasizes that reading teaching should consider students’ reading self-efficacy.In recent years,many scholars have examined ways to improve students’ self-efficacy in reading.Therefore,this study explored the following questions:1)What are the effects of implementing reciprocal teaching on students’ English reading comprehension? 2)What are the effects of implementing reciprocal teaching on students’ reading self-efficacy?To address the above two problems,this study selected 100 eighth-grade junior high school students from two parallel classes of No.9 Middle School in Yuzhong County as the research subjects.The two classes are randomly divided into the experimental and control classes.The English reading test and the English reading self-efficacy questionnaire are used as research tools.The English reading test aims to explore the effects of the reciprocal teaching method on students’ reading comprehension,and the questionnaire aims to explore the effects of the reciprocal teaching method on students’ English reading self-efficacy.After a 14-week empirical study,before the experiment,the experimental and control classes took the reading comprehension test simultaneously to explore whether the two classes were at the same level.In the experiment,the experimental class trained the students through the reciprocal teaching strategies of predicting,clarifying,questioning and summarizing,while the control class adopted the PWP teaching model.After the experiment,the two groups of students were tested for reading comprehension again,and the English reading self-efficacy questionnaires were distributed.The data were analyzed by means of independent samples and paired sample T-tests with the help of SPSS software.This study draws the following conclusions: First,reciprocal teaching positively impacts junior middle school students’ English reading comprehension.After the experiment,the average reading score of the experimental class improved.At the same time,students’ abilities in prediction,clarification,questioning,and summary are also improved,and students can clearly understand and skillfully use reciprocal teaching.Second,reciprocal teaching has positively impacted junior middle school students’ English reading self-efficacy.Students’ overall sense of self-efficacy in English reading reached the medium level,but there were apparent differences among different dimensions.Specifically,the sequence of the three dimensions of self-efficacy in English reading is: "sense of effort," "sense of setback and challenging" and "sense of competence".In the comparative study between the experimental class and the control class,the self-efficacy of "sense of competence" and "sense of setback and challenging" both showed significant differences and improved greatly,however,students’ sense of effort did not significantly improve their sense of self-efficacy.