Educational Research AY2015/2016

Many researchers in the West have come up with different teaching instruments to teach reading comprehension. Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest) is one of them. According to Manzo (1969), ReQuest was designed to help students generate their own questions, encourage inquiring attitude and develop independent comprehension skills. This study aims to find out whether students would be able to generate higher order thinking questions and if so, will ReQuest lesson work well in Singapore English curriculum. 21 high and middle progress Primary five students from a local school were taught and observed. The findings point out that more than half of the students were able to generate higher order questions and produce acceptable answers. As observed through the discussions, students negotiated meaning and picked out salient information presented in the reading text. They also exhibit desire to search deeper into text through clarification, re-reading before coming to a consensus the type of questions they wanted to generate. They asked speculative questions such as how and why which opened up the floor for further discussions. This implies that ReQuest is a good tool to be used in Singaporean reading comprehension lessons. It gives students opportunity to go deeper in their response to the text. The process of re-reading allows students to pick up salient information from the text. It also offers students to be active participants in the comprehension process, encourages critical literacy and enhances questioning techniques which they could use it to practise self-questioning for other academic readings.