EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHERS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (TPD) ON RECIPROCAL TEACHING STRATEGIES

Abstract

There has been outcry over the inability of new and less experienced English teachers to apply strategies that could enhance students’ reading comprehension. Reciprocal Teaching Strategy (RTS) was therefore introduced via the teacher professional development (TPD to augment teachers’ competence in reading comprehension. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher professional development on reciprocal strategies among less experienced English language teachers in South East, Nigeria. The impact of reciprocal teaching has been continually established if the approach is properly carried under a guidance of an expert. Professional development has been a recognized management practice where teachers are trained to develop their professional and pedagogical skills that would effectively and efficiently enhance their teaching performance in class. Experimental research design was applied for this evaluation (pre-test-intervention-post-test approach) to determine the effectiveness of the strategy. A total of N=56 constitutes the sample size. Teacher survey questionnaire (TSQ) was the instrument for data collection. The result shows a significant improvement after the intervention. This paper therefore concludes that RTS is a good strategy to teach reading of comprehension to students. It also summarized that TDP is an effective strategy to improve the competency level of new and less experienced English teachers.