Improving reading comprehension through reciprocal teaching: the didactic experimentation of Reading Comprehension – Reciprocal Teaching program

Abstract

Reading literacy, characterized by that set of knowledge, skills and strategies necessary not only in the period of schooling but throughout lifelong, is among the prominent themes of national and international research. It is possible to facilitate the comprehension process and fill the textual gaps when systematic and structured enhancement paths are designed and implemented, which call for specific processes involved in reading text. This work is part of the wider national Reading Comprehension - Reciprocal Teaching (RC-RT) project, promoted by the association S.Ap.I.E, and describes a research-training path implemented in the fourth grade of primary school, aimed at improving text comprehension focusing on the synthesis ability. The reading comprehension and the ability to synthesis information are closely related as the reader must summarize what he has read in order to reconstruct a global text representation, faithful to the original. Data analysis confirms the effectiveness of the intervention program, reporting an accentuated increase in the final performance in the experimental classes involved.