COMMUNICATIVE AND COGNITIVE FACTORS AS DETERMINANTS OF LEARNING OUTCOMES IN ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION AMONG SENIOR SECONDARY STUDENTS IN OYO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Reading Comprehension (RC) is indispensable to academic success. Reports have shown that learning outcomes (LO) - (achievement and attitude) of many public Senior Secondary students in English RC are not satisfactory in Nigeria, including Oyo State. Past studies focused more on intervention to improve learning outcomes in English RC than on communicative and cognitive factors. This research, therefore, was carried out to investigate communicative (Topic Familiarity- TF, Language Anxiety- LA and Syntactic Ability- SA) and cognitive (Text Structure Knowledge- TSK and Cognitive Style- CS) factors as determinants of LO in English Reading Comprehension (ERC) among the Senior Secondary School students in Oyo State, Nigeria The Foreign Language Anxiety, Multiple Intelligences and Schema theories provided the framework while the study adopted survey design of the correlational type. Ten Local Government Areas (LGAs) were randomly selected from the existing 33 in Oyo State, Nigeria. The simple random sampling technique was used to select 50 public Senior Secondary Schools (five from each LGA). Two thousand five hundred Senior Secondary two students (50 from each school) were randomly selected. The instruments used were Attitude to English Reading Comprehension (r =0.74), Syntactic Ability (r = 0.80), Language Anxiety (r = 0.78), Cognitive Style (r = 0.79) questionnaires; Topic Familiarity Scale (r = 0.87), English Reading Comprehension Achievement (r = 0.81) and Text Structure Knowledge (r = 0.81) tests. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and Multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance. The respondents’ age was 16.90 ± 2.06 years and 52.3% were female. Students’ TF (𝑥̅ = 2.26), LA (𝑥̅= 3.14) and SA (𝑥̅ = 3.96) were high at threshold of 2.00, 2.50 and 3.00, respectively. Students’ SA (r = 0.08) had a positive relationship with achievement in ERC, but TF, LA and CS did not, while TSK (r = -0.22) had a negative relationship with students’ achievement in ERC. This means that TF, LA and CS, were inversely related with students’ achievement in ERC. Students’ TF (r = 0.01) had a positive relationship with students’ attitude to ERC, but LA, SA, CS and TSK did not. The composite contribution of the independent variables to achievement was significant (F (5; 2,354) = 27.17; Adj. R2 = 0.53), accounting for 53.0% of the variance. There was no significant composite contribution of SA, LA, CS and TSK to students’ attitude. Students’ SA (β = 0.08) and TSK (β = -0.22) made significant relative contributions to achievement in English RC, while only TF (β = 0.05) made significant relative contribution to attitude. Syntactic ability and text structure knowledge influenced achievement in English reading comprehension, while topic familiarity influenced attitude to English reading comprehension among Senior Secondary students in Oyo State, Nigeria. Teachers of English Language should focus on these factors to improve learning outcomes in English reading comprehension.