Reciprocal Cooperative Learning in the Teaching of Reading Comprehension

Reciprocal Cooperative Learning by Annemarie Palincsar and Anne Brown (1984) examine changes in student reading comprehension when reading and the changes in how the students used the predicting, questioning, and summarizing strategies. The techniques ask students to employ four strategies: predict what they will read, generate questions about what was read, clarify any ideas that were not understood in the reading, and summarize the main idea of the reading. The study was implemented in second grading period within the school year 2016-2017 in Jacinto P. Elpa National High School. This study made use the pretest-posttest quasiexperimental research design to determine the effectiveness of Reciprocal Cooperative Learning (RCL) as a reading comprehension approach. A prepost test design without a control group, this requires collecting data on the study of participants' level of performance before the intervention took place (pre-), and to collect the same data after the intervention took place (post-). This study was used in tow sections which were both given the same treatment. The pretest was given to both groups after which the intervention was introduced to both groups, which was the Reciprocal Cooperative Learning. The Oral Reading Proficiency Test (ORPT) Result of the students from the previous school year was used as a secondary data to establish the real scenario of the reading profile of the students regarding Word Recognition and Comprehension. The data were processed employing the weighted mean and T-Test. By the findings, the following conclusions were derived: Students still needs to be exposed to reading materials and other avenues where English is the medium. Results showed that most of the students still belong to the Instructional level regarding Word Recognition. Regarding Comprehension, majority of the Grade 8 populace belongs to the Frustration Level. It connotes that even at their level they still have not developed reading comprehension strategies to aid them in comprehending a text read. The scores of the students in the four strategies of the Reciprocal Cooperative Learning namely; Predicting, Clarifying, Questioning and Summarizing increased. Thus Reciprocal Cooperative Learning was effective in improving the students' Reading Comprehension Skills.