Abstract:
English language curriculum is split into oracy and literacy skills and taught in secondary schools to equip learners with ability to use the language correctly in oral and written communication. However, deficiency in it, accounts for Senior Secondary School (SSS) students’ poor English language communication skills. Previous studies largely focused on teachers’ instructional strategies with less emphasis on their curriculum-awareness, effectiveness and textbook content-adequacy. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate teacher curriculum-awareness, effectiveness and textbook contents-adequacy as predictors of SSS students’ achievement in English oracy and literacy skills in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Existentialist Learning theory provided the anchor, while the descriptive design was adopted. Multistage sampling procedure was used. Six Local Government Areas (LGAs) out of 11in Ibadan land were randomly selected, while 18 (three per LGA) public co-educational SSS with graduate English language teachers and more than 50 SSS II students were purposively selected. Fifty-four English language teachers (three per school) and 900 SSS II students (50 per school) were randomly selected as participants. Each teacher’s effectiveness score was correlated against the average score of students in each class in oracy and literacy skills in each school. Instruments used were Teacher Curriculum-Awareness Questionnaire (r=0.93); Teacher Effectiveness (r=0.87) and Textbook Content-Adequacy (r=0.99) rating scales; English Oracy Skill (written) (r=0.84), English Oracy Skill (spoken) (r=0.84) and English Literacy Skill (r=0.77) achievement tests, and oral interview guide. While qualitative data were content analysed, quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and Multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance. The threshold of 2.50 was considered as criterion norm.
Teacher curriculum-awareness ( =2.67; SD = .89) and textbook-content adequacy ( =2.96; SD = .91) were high, while teacher effectiveness ( =2.44; SD = .79) was low. Students’ English oracy skill (spoken) ( =2.48; SD = .77), English oracy skill (written) ( =2.43; SD = .77) and literacy skill ( =2.41; SD = .81) were low. While teacher curriculum-awareness (r=0.46) and effectiveness (r=0.25) had significant positive correlation with students’ achievement in English oracy skill, textbook content-adequacy (r=.018) had positive significant correlation with English literacy skill. The independent variables had significant joint predictions on oracy skill (F(2.899)= 10.52, adj. R2 =.03) and literacy skill (F(2.899)= 6.70, adj. R2=.02); accounting for 3.4% and 2.2% to their variances respectively. Only textbook content-adequacy (β=0.18) had relative contribution to students’ English oracy skill, while textbook content-adequacy (β=0.12) and teacher curriculum-awareness (β=0.09) had relative contributions to students’ English literacy skill but teacher effectiveness had none to both. Teachers were not provided with copies of the English language curriculum, hence their inabilities to properly implement the English language curriculum.
Though, teacher curriculum-awareness and textbook content-adequacy influenced students’ achievement in oracy and literacy skills, however, the English language curriculum was not properly implemented in senior secondary schools in Ibadan, Nigeria. Teachers of English language should take cognisance of these factors for improved students’ achievement in English oracy and literacy skills.
