Three studies were conducted to test the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching as a means of instructing seventh grade poor readers about activities they could use to increase comprehension and to ascertain that their comprehension was proceeding smoothly (comprehension monitoring). Reciprocal teaching involves having teacher and students take turns leading dialogues focusing on pertinent text features. Four comprehension-enhancing activities were emphasized: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The reciprocal method was compared to a traditional teaching method in the first study, with the reciprocal method producing greater gains and maintaining those gains over a longer period than the traditional method. In the second study, reciprocal teaching resulted in sizable gains on laboratory comprehension tests; reliable maintenance; generalization to classroom comprehension tests; transfer to novel laboratory tasks that tapped the trained skills of summarizing, questioning, and clarifying; and improvement of scores on standardized comprehension tests. These results were replicated in the third study in which volunteer teachers (rather than experimenters) used the method with their own reading groups. (Extensive tables of data are appended.) (FL)