The effect of reciprocal teaching on 4th grade primary school students' reading comprehension, summarizing skills and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies in an EFL context

The primary aim of this study is to investigate the effect of Reciprocal Teaching on 4th grade primary school students' reading comprehension, summarizing skills and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies in an EFL context. To achieve this, a quasi-experimental design with pre-tests and post-tests for control and experimental groups is used. To examine the effects of Reciprocal Teaching instruction, students in the experimental group were treated with Reciprocal Teaching instruction for 6 weeks after 3 weeks of Reciprocal Teaching time, 2 lessons (80 minutes) every week. In contrast, the control group continued with the regular school curriculum for the same duration. Reciprocal Teaching strategies (predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing) are implemented under the teacher's guidance to the experimental group for 6 weeks. The subjects were 96 4th grade students, 48 in the control group and 48 in the experimental group. At the end of 6 weeks of treatment, the pre and post test results of "The Reading Comprehension Test", "The Rubric of Summarizing Skills" and "Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Test" are compared. As measurement tools, 20 questions from the TOEFL Reading Comprehension Test for 4th graders developed by an international committee established by ETS, and the scoring key (rubric) for assessing summarization skills for 4th grade students and the revised version of the Metacognitive Reading Strategies Awareness Inventory developed by Mokhtari and Reichard (2002) and adapted into Turkish by Caner and Rabia Börekçi (2023) were used. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) were conducted to perform pre and post-test analysis where the pretest was used as a covariate to remove the possible effects of the pretest (covariant) from the dependent variable (post-test). ANCOVA results showed that the RT group significantly outperformed the control group in both reading comprehension (F = 6.86, p = .010, η² = .069) and summarizing skills (F = 17.20, p < .001, η² = .157), with medium to large effect sizes. For overall metacognitive awareness (MARSI total), the group effect was borderline significant (F = 3.95, p = .050, η² = .041), indicating a small but meaningful contribution. MANCOVA analyses of the MARSI subscales revealed that RT produced a significant improvement in Support Reading Strategies (SRS) (F = 6.25, p = .014, η² = .064), while increases in Global Reading Strategies (GRS) and Problem-Solving Strategies (PSS) were not statistically significant. All statistics were conducted using SPSS version 24. Keywords: Reading Comprehension Skills, Reciprocal Reading Strategies, EFL Reading Strategies, Metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, Global Reading Strategies, Problem Solving Strategies, Support Reading Strategies, Summarizing Skills