Predominant factors contributing to low reading abilities of pupils at Elsie Lund Basic School in the Tamale Metropolis, Ghana

Issah Mohammed

doi:10.30918/aerj.64.18.071

Abstract

Predominant factors contributing to low reading abilities of pupils at Elsie Lund Basic School in the Tamale Metropolis, Ghana

Highlights

Reading is crucial to the academic success of pupils and to the growth of a nation (Oberholzer, 2005; Oyetunji, 2011)
Some recommendations were made to ensure an improvement in the reading abilities of the pupils, including: teachers building the confidence level of the pupils in reading through making them read cooperatively, the school authority supplying adequate pre-reader books to facilitate the teaching and learning of reading in the school, parents ensuring adequate supply of pre-reader books at home, parents rewarding and complementing their children for improved reading abilities, the school organising reading competitions among pupils and the school management partnering with the Ghana Education Service to organize inservice training for all language teachers on phonemic awareness strategy in teaching reading skills
The predominant factors found in the study which contribute to the low reading abilities of the pupils are: (i) inadequate confidence level of pupils, (ii) poor motivation given to pupils to stimulate their interest in reading, (iii) lack of pre-reader books in school and at home, (iv) low phonemic awareness skills of pupils and (v) teacher inadequate knowledge on teaching phonemic awareness skills

Summary

Introduction

Reading is crucial to the academic success of pupils and to the growth of a nation (Oberholzer, 2005; Oyetunji, 2011). While it is true that language competency is both the means and the end to educational achievement, the acquisition of its proficiency requires fluent reading fluency in reading is always met with a complex interaction of factors resulting to pupils’ poor reading, learning and achievement (Jordaan, 2011). According to Botha et al (2008) one of the complex factors resulting in pupils’ poor reading, learning and achievement are the teachers because most of them are not trained to teach basic reading. They continued to state that the employment of unqualified language teachers has had a negative impact on the quality of teaching and learning of reading subjects in schools (Botha et al, 2008). In addition to the reasons for pupils’ poor reading abilities in schools, Moats and Tolman (2011) assert that the majority of pupils who are poor readers and poor spellers have weak phonological processing skills (Moats and Tolman, 2011)

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion