Effect of the discourse analysis strategy and the conventional approach on pupil's performance in reading comprehension in Bemba

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Date
2011-06-16
Authors
Nkosha, Dickson Chishimba
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This study attempted to find out whether the pupils who were taught reading comprehension in Bemba using the discourse analysis strategy would obtain significantly higher scores in a post-test comprising the conventional and the discourse analysis questions, than those using the conventional approach. The original sample of the study consisted of 92 Grade 11 pupils in two classrooms drawn from a population of about '200 girls (i.e., four Grade 11 classrooms'), through cluster-sampling, at Kasama Girls Boarding Secondary School in the Northern Province of Zambia. Cluster sampling was used because the individuals in the population that was sampled were grouped into classrooms (i.e., clusters) (.Mason, 1.978: 174; Borg and Gall, 1979:537-8K The sample size was reduced to 70 girls after eliminating those who were not taking' bemba in both classes. Grade 11 Green, which was coded class A1. , was the experimental group while Grade 11 Grange, which was labelled, class AT,. was the centrol group. Teaching and testing materials (i.e., reading passages followed by a variety of questions in the practice and testing exercises) which were used to gather research data for testing the hypothesis constituted the research measures. These materials were designed according to the specifications of each of the two teaching approaches referred to above. The measures were pretested at Kalonga, and Kasarna Boys Secondary Schools in a pilot study before they were administered, to the subjects in the main study at Kasama Girls Secondary School. After the pretest (i.e., Test Bl) had been administered to both the experimental group and the control group on September 24, 1991, the ordinary class teacher, who acted as an experimenter, started administering the two treatments to the two groups on the following day. Class Al received the discourse analysis method and class A2 received the conventional method. At the end of a two-month period a posttest (i.e., Test B2) was administered to both groups. Both the pretest and posttest consisted of ten multiple -choice discourse analysis and ten conventional direct, or free response questions. Therefore, each test comprised twenty items. The raw scores recorded for each subject represent the number of correct responses given out of the twenty items in either the pretest or posttest. value of F was 3.98. Since the obtained F-ratio (3.40) was smaller than the tabled value (3.98), it was concluded that statistically there was not a significant difference between the post test mean scores of the experimental group1 and the control group. Although there was no significant difference (statistically'! between the performance of the two groups, a close examination of the subjects' individual posttest scores revealed that there was a small positive tendency for the discourse analysis group to do slightly better than the conventional approach group. In the face of the dearth of teaching and. testing? materials as well as guidelines for reading comprehension in Zambian languages, and the almost exclusive use of one method (i.e., the conventional approach) in Zambian schools, it is hoped that this study will contribute significantly to the; work of the Curriculum Development Centre, Examinations Council of Zambia, Zambia Educational Materials Project (ZEMP), and classroom, practice in schools and colleges. Also, since this study has attempted to demonstrate the use of some principles of communicative language teaching (CLT), as propagated by psycholinguists, sociolinguists, formal and applied linguists and other proponents of CLT (Brown and Yule, 1983:viii x, 1; Widdowson, 1978:144-63, 1979:89, 93, 143-6; Richards and, Rodgers, 1986:66, 69-77), it is hoped that it will contribute to current trends in language teaching.
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Discourse Analysis--Zambia
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