COVID-19 AND NIGERIAN PUPILS’ READING DISTRESSES: EXPERIMENTING COLLABORATIVE TECHNIQUE FOR THE REVATALISATION OF LOWER-BASIC SCHOOL PUPILS’ READING CULTURE

Abstract

The development of lower-basic school was replicated prior to the attainment of independent in Nigeria. This is a move to look inward on how the country can lay a very good foundation for Nigeria education. The emergency of covid-19 pandemic that compulsorily short down schools across the globe in no doubt affects Nigerian pupils reading culture. The trust of this paper therefore, is to experiment how collaborative as an instructional technique can close the reading-culture vacuum created by the covid-19 pandemic with a view to suggesting ways of improving the quality of teaching and learning reading comprehension. A quasi-experimental design with pre and post-test, non-randomized, and non-equivalent was adopted for data collection. The population for this study consisted of all upper-basic school pupils in Ilorin metropolis. Two schools were purposively sampled. The sample was categorized into one experimental group and one control group of fifty respondents each. The data collected were analysed using the percentage, mean, standard deviation and analysis of Co-variance (ANCOVA) to test the two formulated hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that: the general level of pupils’ achievement in reading comprehension was low before the treatments (42.79) but high after the treatments (77.76) irrespective of gender. The paper recommends that teachers of the English language should wake up and move in line with the modern trends through the use of collaborative instructional techniques in order to improve the teaching and learning of reading comprehension. Teachers and other stakeholders should try and leave up expectations by encouraging collaborative techniques for teaching reading. Curriculum planners and developers should not be left out in this regard.