Reciprocal Teaching and Transenvironmental Programming: A Program to Facilitate the Reading Comprehension of Students with Reading Difficulties

Abstract

This article reports on experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of combining two metacognitive instructional approaches to enhance the reading comprehension skills of upper-primary poor readers. The program involves the use of reciprocal teaching procedures in the resource room and transenvironmental programming techniques by which students were instructed to employ the newly learned comprehension strategies in their homeroom reading and social studies classes. The results support previous research into the facilitative effects of reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension and of transenvironmental programming on transfer of learning across settings. Of greater importance is the finding that it is the combination of the two instructional approaches that has provided a very effective means of facilitating poor readers' unprompted use of relevant strategies for enhancing text processing.