Deaf Children's Acquisition of Prereading Skills Using the Reciprocal Teaching Procedure.

Information is presented on the implementation of a prereading program in a school setting using the reciprocal training procedure and on implications for educators, teacher educators, and parents. This instructional procedure, grounded in Vygotsky's theory of language and learning, is an interactive dialogue through which the teacher explicitly models four prereading skills: finger spelling, book reading, story retelling, and word recognition during story-time session with experimental storybooks. Pre-post test analyses show that gains were made in letter, word, and story knowledge through the use of the reciprocal teaching procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]