Annemarje Sullivan Palingsar, Kathryn Ransom, and Sit Derber

About Reciprocal Teaching In reciprocal teaching, students and teachers talk to one another about the meaning of text, taking turns leading the dialogue The dialogue is struc tured to incorporate four strategies: generating questions about the con tent, summarizing the content, clarify ing points, and predicting upcoming content from cues in the text or from prior knowledge of the topic (see box, p. 39) These four activities represent the kinds of strategic engagement ex perienced by successful readers (Bereiter and Bird 1985) Dialogue—simple conversation with a purpose—was selected as the means of helping students become more suc cessful readers because (1) it is a lan guage format with which children are familiar, and (2) it provides a useful vehicle for alternating control of the activity between teacher and students in a systematic and purposeful man ner. When the teacher leads the dia logue, he or she models the targeted strategies. As the students assume re sponsibility for leading the dialogue, they practice the strategies within a familiar and meaningful context. In turn, the children's participation pro vides the teacher with rich opportuni ties to diagnose their streng'hs and weaknesses and to provide follow-up