Abstrak
This study investigates the effect of Reciprocal Teaching on the reading comprehension of eighth-grade students at SMPN 10 Tarakan, focusing on narrative texts. Employing a pre-experimental design, the study involved 25 students from class VIII-4 as the sample. Data were obtained using multiple-choice reading comprehension tests administered as a pretest and a posttest. The findings demonstrate a meaningful improvement in students' performance, with the mean score increasing from 31.60 in the pretest to 56.20 in the posttest. The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test revealed a significance value of 0.000 (p 0.05), indicating a statistically significant difference between pretest and posttest scores. In addition, the Normalized Gain (N-Gain) score was 0.35, which falls within the moderate category. These results suggest that Reciprocal Teaching contributes to improving students' reading comprehension through its four instructional steps predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing-which encourage learners to engage actively with texts through collaborative discussion. In practice, this approach supported students in addressing vocabulary-related difficulties and strengthening inferential comprehension. The study implies that Reciprocal Teaching can enhance students' independence in monitoring and regulating their understanding, offering practical value for teachers in addressing reading challenges and providing a reference for future research on literacy-focused interventions.