VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL

STUDIES

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

ACTION RESEARCH
RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Implementing Reciprocal Teaching in a Vietnamese prep-test
Classroom: An Action Research

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Le Hung Tien

Student name: Pham The Nam
Student code: 22046420
DOB: 12/01/1999
Class: PG40
 I. Introduction

In higher education, many students sit the IELTS test for entrance admission or even

graduation requirements, which contains a reading test. However, when pressed to read,

college students often select ineffective and inefficient strategies with little strategic

intent (Wood, Motz, & Willoughby, 1998). This is frequently caused by their poor

comprehension of reading strategies and disinterest in monitoring comprehension

(Dreyer, 1998). The limited work demands of high school and the traditional reading

instruction's emphasis on the teacher's one-way lecture and knowledge reproduction may

also be contributing factors (Dreyer & Nel, 2003). Because of this, some students do not

use reading methods or monitor their comprehension until they are explicitly requested

to do so through activities or instruction.

The need for undergraduate students to improve their reading skills is more pressing.

According to a quick survey the teacher-researcher conducted at the start of the course,

almost all of the participants in the study's target class must read journals, references, or

research as part of their coursework or to continue their education abroad, which

necessitates critical reading for admissions evaluation. Although some students are still

unsure of the need to improve reading comprehension, none of them anticipate reading

failure that could result in poor academic performance. Therefore, teaching

undergraduate students reading comprehension strategies explicitly is one way to

address the issue of weak reading comprehension abilities.

Numerous studies recommend the use of reading strategies in remedial instruction to

improve the reading comprehension of underprepared college students and Reciprocal

Teaching (RT) has become one of the key tactics in studies on the use of different

reading comprehension methodologies.

II. Identification of the Problem

The teacher-researcher who has been teaching undergraduate for more than two years

discovered that they were having difficulty responding to questions in the TOEIC and

IELTS reading sections. According to the results of the IELTS tests for reading

competence and interviews the majority of students complete the readings passively.

They attempt to comprehend the text. They even utilize translation tools and seek up the

definitions of every word in the dictionary and on the internet as they hardly ever

understand the sentences. Using the questionnaire that inquires about the common

reading challenges students have, a fast interview has been done to identify issues. There

are four basic causes that have been identified, namely: a lack of techniques; a lack of

reading drive and interest; a lack of vocabulary; a lack of knowledge about the topics

During an interview, some students spoke about their lack of a strategy and how they

frequently struggle to read. They would have to spend a considerable amount of time

trying to read the text again in order to understand thoroughly. According to the poll

results, students' primary issue appears to be a lack of strategies. As a result, the

researcher needs to carefully examine the question of how RT affects undergraduate

students' reading comprehension in IELTS courses.

III. Purpose and significance of the study

This study focuses on two main objectives: (1) To find out what strategies can students

apply in their process of reading; and (1) To find out to what extent RT strategies can

improve students’ reading proficiency. To accomplish these objectives, a qualitative

research would be employed, aiming at answering three research questions:

1) What RT strategies have undergraduate students employed in their reading process in

the IELTS reading test?

(2) To what extent can undergraduate students employ the critical reading strategies in

their reading process in the IELTS reading test?

(3) How effective is RT in improving reading comprehension for undergraduate

students in the IELTS reading test?

IV. Literature review

4.1. Reciprocal teaching

Reciprocal teaching is a form of instruction where instructors and pupils converse about

passages of text in order to develop the meaning of the passage. The concept of reciprocal

teaching was first developed by Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Ann L. Brown in 1984

and is said to improve learners' reading comprehension.

According to Palincsar (1986), the goal of reciprocal teaching is to encourage a

collaborative effort between the teacher and students as well as among students to

interpret the text. In particular, reciprocal teaching entails three main components: (a)

the teaching and learning of specific reading comprehension strategies; (b) the dialogue
between a teacher and students in which the teacher demonstrates the reasons for,

situations in which, and applications of these reading comprehension strategies; and (c)

the students assuming the role of the teacher by starting to model the reading

comprehension strategies for other students. Palincsar and Brown (1984), in their

original research, used four discrete reading comprehension strategies within reciprocal

teaching: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting.

Four specific reading skills that are actively and purposefully employed to promote

understanding are given to students using a reciprocal approach: questioning, clarifying,

summarizing, and predicting.

1. questioning:

Asking questions regarding identifying information, topics, and ideas central and

important enough to make sure to check further. Center or important information, topic,

or idea is used to create questions which are then used as self-test for readers. Asking

questions is allowed a context for deepening the text

2. Summary:

Summarizing involves identifying key information, topics, and ideas in a text and

integrating them into a clear, concise statement that conveys the essential meaning of the

text. The summary can be based on a paragraph, a portion of text, or an entire paragraph.

Summarizing provides the impetus needed to create context for understanding the

specifics of the text.

3. Clarify:

Clarification involves illuminating and clarifying what is unclear,difficult or unknown

aspects of a text. These aspects may include confusing sentence or paragraph structure,

unfamiliar vocabulary, unclear references, or confusing concepts. Clarification provides

impetus to correct confusion through proofreading, using the context in which the text is

written and/or read, and using external sources. (e.g. dictionary or thesaurus).

4. Predicting:

Predicting includes combining the reader’s prior knowledge, new knowledge from the

textual content to create hypotheses associated with the path of the textual content and

the author’s reason in writing. Predicting presents an general intent for reading – to

verify or disconfirm self-generated hypotheses.

However, merely relying on the above-mentioned techniques for comprehending the text

is inadequate to attain the aims of reciprocal teaching. A crucial element is also the

exchange of ideas. By exchange of ideas, we mean the conversations, inquiries,

responses, and assessments that transpire while interpreting and grasping the text

(Palinscar, 1986). The process of RT involves giving students clear instructions,

demonstrating extensively, and practicing the four strategies repeatedly, as outlined by

Palincsar & Brown (1984) It is a continuous conversation between the instructor and the

students, as well as among the students themselves. The dialogue leader, whether it is an

experienced student or the instructor, provides support by demonstrating the strategies

and asking guided questions to enhance the students' comprehension monitoring. This

means that the more proficient individuals share their thought processes to encourage

others to monitor their comprehension. The support provided is overt and explicit, and
gradually diminishes as the students become more familiar with the strategies and the

process (Rosenshine & Meister, 1994) or when they take responsibility for their own

reading (Palincsar & Brown, 1984).

V. Methods and Procedures

1. Participants

A total of twelve students of mixed genders participated in the study. They are currently

undergraduate students studying at different universities in Vietnam with English

proficiency ranging from B1 to B2(CEFR). Specifically, they will be divided randomly into

three groups on which the research will conduct the experimental study

2. Data Collection Method

In this action research, it has been mentioned that before the project, an interview has

been distributed to gain qualitative data from which teacher-researchers could figure out

the research problems. To present a comprehensive view of how RT enhances the

reading comprehension of students, the study employs mixed methods that combine

qualitative and quantitative approaches to gather and analyze empirical data. A reading

comprehension test(IELTS reading test) , is used to assess the reading comprehension

of twelve students before and after receiving RT from their teacher. The data obtained

from the pretest and posttest provide statistical insight into the students' comprehension

of the texts. Furthermore, the qualitative methodology in the form of semi-structured

interviews is to be conducted after the posttest to gather personal opinions from the
students and support the statistical evidence. The research phases should follow the

order:

Phase 1: Pretest - interview

Phase 2: 4 week of learning and applying RT

Phase 3: Post-test and interview

3. Data analysis and result presentation

Researchers suggest the following ideas for presenting data obtained from both

quantitative and qualitative collections. After careful calculation, the test results are first

displayed in tabular form. With a graph like this, it's easy to see if your students have

improved their reading comprehension. For data from the interview, the teacher might

use the data from the test again to gain qualitative data. Having got the data from each

student, researchers would conduct the interrelating description and, finally, interpret the

meaning, aiming to answer the research questions. The researcher would pick out the

actions that readers have performed and compare with the test results. Therefore,

research question 1, 2, 3 can be solved.

Reference

Palincsar, A.S. (1986). Reciprocal teaching. In Teaching reading as thinking. Oak Brook,

IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Ann L. Brown (1984) Reciprocal Teaching of

Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities

DeVillar, R. A., & Faltis, C. (1991). Organizing the classroom for communication and

learning. Computers and cultural diversity: Restructuring for school success (p. 9).

Albany: State University of New York Press.

Alfassi, M. (1998). Reading for meaning: the efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering

reading comprehension in high school students in remedial reading classes. American

Educational Research Journal, 35, 309–332.

Armbruster, B. B., Anderson, T. H., & Ostertag, J. (1987). Does text

structure/summarization instruction facilitate learning from expository text? Reading

Research Quarterly, 22, 331–346

Kelly, M., Moore, D.W., & Tuck, B.F. (1994). Reciprocal teaching in a regular primary

school classroom. The Journal of Educational Research, 88(1), 53–61.

doi:10.1080/00220671.19 94.9944834

Yu-Fen Yang (2010) Developing a reciprocal teaching/learning system for college

remedial reading instruction

Peter E. Doolittle, David Hicks, and Cheri F. Triplett Virginia Tech, William Dee

Nichols University of North Carolina – Charlotte (2006), Volume 17, Number 2,

106-118 Reciprocal Teaching for Reading Comprehension in Higher Education: A

Strategy for Fostering the Deeper Understanding of Texts