Reciprocal Reading

What is Reciprocal Reading?

Reciprocal Reading is an innovative and powerful classroom strategy that engages children and promotes enhanced comprehension and interactive learning.  Reciprocal Reading is designed to enhance comprehension in the classroom by enabling children to take on a more active role in discussing their texts, usually in small group reading sessions.  Pupils also learn teamwork, negotiation, listening and collaborative skills; all of which are essential skills.

There are 4 comprehension strategies:     

• Predict: What are we going to read about in the next section? (Who, what, why, where, when, how?)
• Clarify: Which words and phrases do we need to find the meaning of?     
• Question: Can we ask questions to help us learn more about this text?   
• Summarise: What are the main ideas of the text / this section?

In each session, children take on the four roles and see these images:

Questioner, Predictor, Summariser, Clarifier

Why use Reciprocal Reading?

• It encourages children to talk with understanding about texts
• It encourages students to think about their own thought process during reading.
• It helps students learn to be actively involved and monitor their comprehension as they read different texts (including extracts)
• It teaches students to ask questions during reading and helps make the text more comprehensible

The document below shows how reciprocal reading can be used when reading with a child 1:1.  By doing this at home, and at school, it will allow these four skills to develop and become further embedded.