Reciprocal Teaching Assisted by Picture Series to Improve Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Many Indonesian junior high school students still struggle to comprehend English texts, considering the fact that reading comprehension is a crucial skill for learning the language. Although previous studies have displayed the effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching and Picture Series, limited studies have investigated their combination in recount texts. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate whether there was a significant difference between students taught using this approach and those taught traditionally, along with attempting to examine the impact of Reciprocal Teaching assisted by Picture Series on eighth-grade students’ reading comprehension. In this quantitative study, 60 eighth-grade students participated in a quasi-experimental non-equivalent control group design, with 31 students in the experimental group and 29 students in the control group. The data were collected through pre-test and post-test with 20 multiple-choice questions and analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Shapiro Wilk Test, the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test, and the Mann-Whitney U Test through IBM SPSS version 25. Both the control and experimental group significantly improved, according to the findings, however, the experimental group demonstrated more progress than the control group. Therefore, Reciprocal Teaching assisted by Picture Series may serve as an effective alternative for improving students’ reading comprehension of recount texts while encouraging interactive EFL reading instruction.