The Use of Extensive Reading in Promoting Communication Competence in Secondary School
Chapter One
Objectives of the Study
The aim of this research work is to investigate the extent of the use of extensive reading in promoting communication competence in secondary school with reference to some secondary schools in Shomolu Local Government Area of Lagos State. The specific objectives are;
- To ascertain the teachers awareness of the benefits of extensive reading.
- To identify the types of reading materials available for extensive reading in schools.
- To determine the extent teacher engages student in extensive reading.
- To determine the techniques/strategies teachers employ in developing extensive reading for communication competence.
CHAPTER TWO
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Introduction
Reading is one of the basic skills in language learning and teaching. Chastain (1988) stated that second and foreign language students need to read large quantities of authentic materials in order to be able to read for communication. Reading is a crucially important language skill. Its importance is much more felt in today’s life than in any time in human history. Thanks to the great improvements in technology, we are being exposed to a vast body of knowledge via internet and in order to understand this knowledge and get advantage of that students need to be proficient readers (Browning, 2003). One of the demanding areas of research in TEFL is on the mismatch that sometimes exists between classroom contexts and the authentic ones related to the natural situations outside the language classroom (Brown, 2000). Clearly, instruction plays an important role in the learner’s success; however, the classroom content needs to be the representation of the real content out of the class to which the students will frequently be exposed to in their real life encounters. Reading comprehension is a complicated process of comprehending a piece of text and then constructing its meaning. To read fluently and with comprehension, students must successfully combine a number of reading sub-skills, pre-requisites for successful reading. In addition to the concept of print, alphabetic awareness, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, syntactic awareness and semantic knowledge they need to understand how texts in English are organized according to their purpose, that is, discourse awareness. Decoding English does not automatically bring comprehension, and the point of reading is to understand what is read. For such a purpose, students need good general language comprehension, with adequate semantic, syntactic and discourse knowledge to draw upon to enable reading with meaning. When discussing “the text” and the semiotic dimensions of the text-work, there seem to be some salient factors which affect reading broadly, such as: real teaching context, the readers’ schemata or background knowledge, their level of language proficiency and also the students’ cultural beliefs about reading.
In the last decade, a vast body of research has been focused on the importance of knowing and applying reading strategies by the second language learners.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
RESEARCH DESIGN
The researcher used descriptive research survey design in building up this project work the choice of this research design was considered appropriate because of its advantages of identifying attributes of a large population from a group of individuals. The design was suitable for the study as the study sought to examine the use of extensive reading in promoting communication competence in secondary school.
SOURCES OF DATA COLLECTION
Data were collected from two main sources namely:
Primary source and Secondary source
Primary source:
These are materials of statistical investigation which were collected by the research for a particular purpose. They can be obtained through a survey, observation questionnaire or as experiment; the researcher has adopted the questionnaire method for this study.
Secondary source:
These are data from textbook Journal handset etc. they arise as byproducts of the same other purposes. Example administration, various other unpublished works and write ups were also used.
POPULATION OF THE STUDY
Population of a study is a group of persons or aggregate items, things the researcher is interested in getting information to examine the use of extensive reading in promoting communication competence in secondary school. A total of two hundred (200) respondents were selected randomly by the researcher as the population of the study.
CHAPTER FOUR
PRESENTATION ANALYSIS INTERPRETATION OF DATA
Introduction
Efforts will be made at this stage to present, analyze and interpret the data collected during the field survey. This presentation will be based on the responses from the completed questionnaires. The result of this exercise will be summarized in tabular forms for easy references and analysis. It will also show answers to questions relating to the research questions for this research study. The researcher employed simple percentage in the analysis.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
Introduction
It is important to reiterate that the objective of this study was to examine the use of extensive reading in promoting communication competency in secondary school.
In the preceding chapter, the relevant data collected for this study were presented, critically analyzed and appropriate interpretation given. In this chapter, certain recommendations made which in the opinion of the researcher will be ways through which extensive reading could be a veritable tool for promoting communication competence in secondary school.
Summary
The ability to communicate fluently and rightly is the core reason behind sending a child to school. If this reason is defeated then, the life of that student is wasted for that season and also the sponsor will be at a great loss. The society needs to churn out individuals from academic institutions that can communicate properly and one of the ways we can do this is to encourage reading among students. Extensive reading in this research does not only apply to the number of hours one spends on a particular literature but the emphasis is on consistency. The study has tried to
Conclusion
Although there have been debates on either reading difficulties are products of neurological or environmental factors, it is believed that reading failure is mostly caused by failure to acquire phonological awareness and skills in alphabetic coding. However, being able to read fluently depends on a number of different skills. Therefore, it is the teachers’ role and responsibility to provide, plan and teach an effective reading program that will enable the learner to become a skilful reader. A good teacher is capable of unleashing the natural reading wisdom of students, and indeed minimizing the reading difficulties of students with disabilities. Nevertheless, reading difficulties of students is of various stages, thus; failure to understand words, failure to understand sentences, failure to understand how sentences relate to one another as well as failure to understand how the whole text fit together. More so, certain factors are responsible for the encumbering of teaching reading skills in Nigerian secondary schools. They include, lack of motivation and poor background of students, over populated classes and inadequate teaching and learning materials among others. However, with the appropriate reading materials, a conducive environment and teachers with adequate educational qualifications and pedagogy of teaching, good reading skills would be impacted to the students. Reading is indeed indispensable in secondary schools and thus government, teachers and parents have major roles to play in ensuring that students acquire good reading skills.
Recommendation
The following are the possible ways to encourage extensive reading amongst students which will in turn promote communication competence in secondary schools.
- The schools should include a considerable time for reading activities.
- The construction of Libraries must be considered a priority.
- Provision of appropriate textbook with up to date information should be made available.
- Employment of competent librarians to administer the activities of
References
- Aebersold, J. A. &Field, M. L.(1997).From Reading to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Anderson, R.C., & Pearson, P.D. (1984). A Schematheoretic View of Basic Processes in Reading. In P.D. Pearson, R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of reading research. White Plains, NY: Longman. Brown, H. D. (2000). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, Fourth Edition. Longman: San Fransisco.
- Browning, J. (2003). Why Teachers Should Use Timed Reading in ESL Classes? The Internet TESL Journal, 9 (6). Retrieved from http://iteslj.org/Articles/Browning- TimedReading.html
- Carrell, P. (1988). Some Causes of Text-boundedness and Schema Interference in ESL Reading. In P. Carrell, J. Devine and D. Eskey (eds.), Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101-113.
- Carrell, P. and Eisterhold, J.(1988).Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy. In P. Carrell, J. Devine and D. Eskey (eds.), Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 73-92.
