The, of, in, A The Effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching Strategy in Improving EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension: A True Experimental

Abstract

 This study investigated the effectiveness of the Reciprocal Teaching Strategy in improving EFL students’ reading comprehension. A quantitative approach with a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group design was employed. The participants were 30 tenth-grade EFL students from two intact classes at a senior high school in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, with 15 students assigned to the experimental group and 15 to the control group. The experimental group received reading instruction through Reciprocal Teaching based on predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing, while the control group received conventional reading instruction. Data were collected using a reading comprehension test consisting of 40 multiple-choice items and 10 essay items and were analyzed using descriptive statistics, assumption tests, paired-samples t-tests, independent-samples t-tests, and effect-size analysis. The findings showed that both groups significantly improved their reading comprehension. However, the experimental group demonstrated substantially greater improvement, with a mean gain of 46.33 points compared with 18.80 points in the control group. The difference in gain scores was statistically significant, t(28) = 5.02, p < .001, with a very large effect size (d = 1.83). The findings indicate that Reciprocal Teaching provided greater support for reading comprehension improvement than conventional instruction. The study suggests that the systematic integration of predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing can provide a structured and student-centered framework for EFL reading instruction.