Reciprocal teaching as a platform for communicative activities in the secondary foreign language classroom: A case study.

摘要

This study investigated how secondary foreign language students in Spanish IV classes could implement modified reciprocal teaching strategies as a platform for meaningful communicative activities in the language classroom. This study expands research introduced by Janet Lijeron's doctoral dissertation for The University of Akron, 1993.;Twenty-one secondary Spanish IV students were trained in strategies designed to strengthen their reading and listening comprehension, and especially their communication skills in the target language. Training was based on Palincsar and Brown's Reciprocal Reading techniques (1984, 1986), with modifications that facilitated adaptation to the foreign language classroom. Student groups read, answered questions over the readings, practiced summarizing material, and then recombined into listener groups in which each member had prepared a different story. Through narration, peer scaffolding and collaboration, students implemented the new strategies.;Data collection was accomplished through direct observation, audiotaping, interviews, discussion, journaling, oral, and written assessments. The research project lasted eight days. All participation was voluntary, without penalty for withdrawal, and participants were invited to review results of the final study. Confidentiality was maintained by using only Spanish first names for the students when reporting findings and by careful handling all data during the research. Upon completion of the research all original materials with identifiers were destroyed.;Results of the study indicate that reciprocal teaching can be an effective procedure in the secondary foreign language classroom. It becomes an efficacious platform for communicative activities when modified slightly from the original model by Palinscar and Brown. Students improved their fluency and oral sentence structure over the course of the research, and demonstrated evidence of strong vocabulary recall when accessed after the study. Most students expressed enthusiasm for the reciprocal strategies, especially for the opportunity to speak at length, an activity that has been rare in the traditional L2 classroom.;Despite students' achievements in gaining communicative skill, many unexpectedly expressed frustration at not being able to speak perfect Spanish in their narrations. Also unanticipated was the theme of trust in cooperative learning groups, which impacted assessment of the efficacy of those groups and also the context of cooperative learning among highly competitive students.