An examination of the teaching and assessement of reading comprehension in selected secondary schools of Ndola district of Zambia.
Loading...
Date
2024
Authors
Lubumbe, Christabel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The University of Zambia
Abstract
Effective and appropriate instructional practices in teaching and assessing reading comprehension by secondary school teachers are very fundamental if learners were to build the reading comprehension skills required for them to pass English language and other subjects. The study therefore examined the teachers’ instructional practices in the teaching and assessment of reading comprehension. This study generally looked at what instructional practices teachers used to help the learners derive meaning or answers from explicitly stated information, making of both direct and indirect inferences, and interpreting/integrating ideas and information. Lastly, the study also focussed on establishing teachers’ instructional practices in ensuring that learners were able to examine and evaluate content, language and textual elements. The other feature that was important to this study was to find out if learners were truly failing reading comprehension assessment or not. Therefore, part of the study assessed the learners in reading comprehension in order to determine if the statistics at national level were the same as at classroom level. Twelve teachers, three heads of departments and 200 learners were sampled from three different government schools of Ndola on the Copperbelt Province of Zambia. These were purposively and simple randomly sampled respectively to participate in the study. The Study employed a Mixed Method approach by way of embedded research design. Data collection was done using lesson observations, semi- structured interviews, questionnaires, document analysis and a reading comprehension test. Thematic analysis was used to analyse qualitative data while Microsoft Excel to find mean averages on learner performance with regard to the four processes of reading comprehension by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) was used
to analyse quantitative data. The findings revealed that, even though teachers taught and assessed the learners in reading comprehension, they did not impart the necessary reading comprehension skills in totality. All the teachers mostly focussed merely on reading, speed, pronunciation of words and vocabulary. They did not give detailed explanations on how the learners were expected to acquire the necessary Comprehension skills. To them,
reading comprehension was about reading a text and then answer a few questions thereafter. Furthermore, it was revealed that learners performed well in the questions that did not require them to think beyond the text but on the other hand, the performance was very poor in those questions that required high thinking skills. In view of this, it was recommended that teachers should be oriented to Progress in International Reading Literacy Study so that they can apply in class when teaching and assessing learners in Reading Comprehension. This will help them discover ways of ensuring that the skills of reading comprehension are imparted in learners. Teachers should also ensure that they plan adequately for reading comprehension and formulate questions based on the skills they are teaching in each particular lesson.
Description
Thesis of Master of Education in Literacy, Language and Applied Linguistics.