Abstract

Purpose: This research aimed to investigate the impact of reciprocal teaching strategies on the reading skills of bilingual students, focusing on three sub-skills: vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension.
Past researches have revealed that bilingual students show a weaker performance in the Persian course. Also, academic drop in bilingual students has been reported more than monolingual students. Students in the first and second grades have more problems in pronouncing the Persian language, which is often related to weakness in the semantic field and using similar examples of words instead of each other (Samavi Aghdam, 2014).
Method: This applied, semi-experimental study employed a pre-test-post-test control group design. The population comprised all bilingual male primary school students in the four districts of Ahvaz city during the 1402-1403 academic year. Using convenient sampling, 32 students were selected for the experimental group and 31 for the control group. Both groups were matched for intelligence quotient and socio-economic status. A researcher-developed pre-test measured vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension skills in both groups. The experimental group received instruction using reciprocal teaching methods. In each intervention session in the experimental group, it was tried to use at least 2 and maximum 4 strategies in the reciprocal teaching method according to the subject of the lesson and educational content, and all the learning activities of the experimental group were done as a group and according to the subject and the educational environment in the form of Groups of 2 to 10 people were conducted. Also, in the experimental group, the teacher first implemented each of the 5 strategies (prediction, clarification, summarizing, questioning and interpretation of coherent links) during two sessions, and then the students implemented it in their groups.
In the prediction strategy, students make a guess or prediction about the topic before reading the lesson text. Then, at the end of the lesson, express their guesses according to the main title, sub-titles of the lesson, pictures, the beginning and end of the paragraphs, the part of the text that the teacher defines as a story, reading only the beginning of the paragraph by the student or the teacher. In the clarifying strategy the students are asked to find the unfamiliar or difficult words in the text and by using strategies such as: taking help from their previous knowledge, paying attention to the pictures, using the dictionary, paying attention to the sentences before and after the unfamiliar word and paying attention to the grammatical structure of the sentence through re-reading it.
In the summarizing strategy, students make to pay attention to the important parts of the text and ignore the irrelevant and unimportant information in the text. The teacher encourages students to summarize techniques such as: underlining unfamiliar and important words in each paragraph by re-reading paragraph by paragraph; Writing the important information in each paragraph in the form of one or two sentences, using new words to write a summary, arranging the summary according to the sequence of the events of the lesson, making notes of one's impression of the text, sharing the impressions and summaries with other members of the group and preparation and presentation of an agreed summary.
The teacher implements self-questioning strategy by using techniques such as: encouraging students to re-read the text and extract 5 questions with question words why, whether, how, when, how, what,... and answer them; answering the questions of the text, trying to write a question with the cooperation of a group after studying the text individually, and finally, asking questions such as: Why do you think...?, What do you think?, When ... it happened, how did you think?. Teacher asked the students while reading the text and trying to find their answers.
Interpreting cohesive ties strategy was executed to create the ability to establish meaningful and coherent relationships between different parts of the text. The techniques used by the teacher in this strategy were: reading the text and underlining a word that is preferably part of the main text of the lesson, asking questions about that word and answering it; answering the conceptual questions of the lesson text; And finally, establishing a connection between paragraphs with the help of relative verbs (is, was, became, become, be, is, is not, so and...).
When the interventions were implemented on the experimental group, the control group was taught using traditional methods (lecture, group discussion, Q&A, and demonstration) over one academic year and 51 sessions. At the end of interventions, both groups’ reading skills were assessed by post-test. Data were analyzed using multivariate covariance.

Results: After controlling for pre-test variables, the results indicated a significant effect of reciprocal teaching on reading fluency (P≤0.003), vocabulary (P≤0.000), and reading comprehension (P≤0.009). Effect sizes showed improvements of 14%, 21%, and 11% in reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, respectively, due to reciprocal teaching. Thus, reciprocal teaching can effectively address reading challenges in bilingual children
According to the researcher's observations, with the help of reciprocal education, students strengthen their self-confidence by following the example of the teacher, and they can consciously and thoughtfully provide their experiences to others in the best way by following the example of the teacher. Also, in reciprocal teaching, one of the important principles in implementing the reciprocal method is the active participation of students in group learning. In line with previous studies, the researchers found that group work as an important component of reciprocal teaching by creating a space for cooperation between children provides opportunities to learn from each other's knowledge, and this principle can be especially useful for bilingual children, because they can benefit from each other's experiences and language knowledge (Okkinga, 2021; Daemi, 2012).
In this research, students were more successful in using clarification and prediction strategies than other strategies. Also, the researchers found that the students read the text more carefully when implementing the questioning strategy, with the aim of finding the answer to the question, and this caused them to make fewer mistakes while reading the text. In using the summarization strategy, which was the most difficult strategy for the students according to the results of the research Aktaş (2023), in the present study, the teacher first tried to ask the students to verbalize the short and key sentences of the text with the help of their classmates. Then, each group takes responsibility for summarizing a part of the story. In summary, this research revealed that the implementation of reciprocal teaching strategies not only created more opportunities for interaction and language production in bilingual students, but also became the factor of active participation of students in the learning process and, as a result, strengthening motivation and self-confidence in students.