The effects of the reap reading comprehension technique on students' success.

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Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal May 1, 2010 | Tasdemir, Mehmet | Copyright

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Several factors have been found to be influential in an individual's learning and academic development. For example, language learning is usually based on comprehension activities such as thinking over information acquired through listening and reading, then forming and evaluating cause-effect relationships (Alfassi, 1998; Bos & Anders, 1990; Epgagan, 2009; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Swanson & Alexander, 1977). Investigations into the effectiveness of students' learning strategies have been becoming increasingly popular and results have revealed close relationships between the learning strategy used and learning. Different taxonomies in learning strategies have also been identified and described (Pressley, 1986). Use of reading strategies is the most important factor in terms of reading comprehension, and reading and reading comprehension strategies have, therefore, been a focus of recent scholarly research. Researchers such as Casanave (1988) found that readers have to use some active comprehension strategies to help them understand a text. There are three stages in the reading process (Gagne, 1985; Vacca, 1981; Vacca & Vacca 1996): before reading, while reading, and after reading. In general, the following reading strategies are used by the learners in the reading process: finding a focus for understanding, establishing a relationship between initial learning and text meaning, thinking about the meaning of text, making conclusions about the test, using prior knowledge for comprehension, controlling reading speed, making predictions about the meanings of unfamiliar words, and making predictions about the meanings of unknown groups of words or sentences in the text (Bingham, 2001; Collins & Cheek, 1999; Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997; Slaimber, 1999). The REAP technique, which can be described as an eclectic combination of these strategies, and the effect on students' success of an educational process employing this technique, are studied in this research. The Read, Encode, Annotate, and Ponder (REAP) technique (Eanet & Manzo, 1976) is based on the premise that readers have the highest levels of comprehension when asked to communicate ideas they have gleaned from a passage they have read. REAP is an alternative to the Directed Reading Activity and Guided Reading Procedure (Tierney, Readence, & Dishner, 1980, p. 26) techniques. The aim of the REAP technique is to help readers synthesize the author's thoughts in their own words, thus improving their comprehension and writing skills so as to enable learning and remembering to occur. REAP was developed for use in improving students' reading, writing, and thinking, and was also designed as a method to teach students ways of responding differently to a text (Eanet & Manzo). Students respond with simple summaries which may be very brief or may required complex critical creativeness. REAP can also be used as a way of observing students' thought development. Teachers can compare the features of student responses using types of summaries, and perform various evaluations based on these. Developing skills for writing short notes forms the foundation of the REAP technique. However, it is deficient in some respects. Indeed, most students may