Abstract:
Reading comprehension is essential for academic success in all school subjects. Records have shown that many Senior Secondary (SS) students are deficient in English Reading Comprehension (ERC) in Ogun State, Nigeria, which partly accounts for their poor performance in English Language at public examinations. Previous studies focused more on interventions, student and home factors than on text quality factors. This study, therefore, was designed to investigate text quality factors (Text Readability-TR, Lexical Complexity-LC, Mechanical Competence-MC and Language Effectiveness-LE) as predictors of learning outcomes (achievement and attitude) in ERC among public senior secondary students in Ogun State, Nigeria.
The study was premised on Roland Barthes’s Text-centered and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar theories, while the mixed methods (QUAN+Qual) design was adopted. Ten Local Government Areas (LGAs) from the existing 25 in Ogun State were randomly selected. Fifty public SS schools (five per LGA) were randomly selected. The simple random sampling technique was employed to select 2,500 SSII students (50 from each school). One hundred teachers (two per school) teaching ERC in SSII were purposively selected based on their teaching experience. The instruments used were ERC Achievement Test (r=0.87), Attitude to ERC Questionnaire (r=0.82), Text readability (r=0.87) Lexical Complexity (r=0.84), Language Effectiveness (r=0.78) and Mechanical Competence Rating (r=0.8) scales. In-depth interviews were held with 10 Heads of Department of English. The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance, while the qualitative data were content-analysed.
The age of the participants were: teachers (28.60±2.20) and students (17.8+2.06) years, while 54.0% and 57.1%, were male respectively. Text readability (x̄=3.11), MC (x̄=4.28) and LE (x̄=3.95 were high, at the threshold of 3.0. Lexical complexity was high (x̄=2.70) at the threshold of 2.50. Text readability (r=0.23), LC (r =0.27) and MC (r =0.27) had significant relationship with achievement in ERC, but LE did not. Text readability, LC, MC and LE had no significant relationships with students’ attitude to ERC. The composite contributions of TR, LC, MC and LE to achievement in (F (4; 95) = 16.95; Adj. R2 = 0.39) and attitude to (F (4; 95) = 7.08; Adj. R2 = 0.20) ERC were significant, accounting for 39.0% and 20.0%, of their variances respectively. The TR (β = .185) made significant relative contribution to achievement in ERC, but LC, MC and LE did not. The LE (β=.349) and MC (β=.023) made significant relative contributions to attitude to ERC, but TR and LC did not. Students’ environments, poor attitude to reading, non-uniformity of textbooks used in different schools, abnormal use of smart phones and inability of students to read and recap were the challenges militating against students’ performance in ERC.
Text readability influenced students’ achievement in English reading comprehension, while language effectiveness and mechanical competence influenced their attitude to English reading comprehension among the selected senior secondary students in Ogun State, Nigeria. Teachers should be mindful of these text quality factors in selecting reading comprehension passages.
