Developing Teachers’ Capacity for Teaching Pupils’ Initial Reading Skills: Research Report

Abstract

The research stemmed from literature that revealed that most pupils in the public primary schools in Nigeria cannot read and write. Some researchers attributed this to poor foundation in teaching initial reading due to teachers’ lack of skills in teaching initial reading and their use of ineffective methods. Based on this, the researchers decided to build the capacity of 40 teachers of Primary 2 classes on the use of the multisensory approach in teaching initial reading which lasted for three weeks. Before the training commenced, a pre-test was administered on the pupils taught by these teachers and eight weeks after the treatment(training) a post-test was administered on the pupils to determine the effects of the treatment. The results of the pre-test and post-test were analysed using t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The t-test results showed a significant difference between the pre- and post-test scores of the pupils and this difference was attributed to the treatment given to the teachers t- calculated value of 24.6 and t-value of 1.984 at 0.05 level of significance with degree of freedom 98. Also the t-test t-test comparison of the mean scores of male and female pupils shows that male students performed better on IRMAT than their female counterpart t-calculated 10.80 at 0.05 level of significance and degree of freedom 98. In addition, when ANOVA was used the result shows that the treatment given to the teachers had a significant impact on the pupils, F-cal =426.29 and f- crit =6.90 (F1, 98 =6.90, P = 0.05). Based on this result, some recommendations were made among which are, the need to retrain all teachers in the lower basic education level, on the use of the multi-sensory approach in teaching initial reading and the use of Jolly phonics technique in teaching initial reading. Key words : Developing, Teachers’ Capacity, Teaching, Initial Reading, Multisensory Approach