Readability Indices, Teachers’ Factors and Academic Achievement in Comprehension Test among Senior Secondary School Students in Oyo State
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Date
2023-12
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Lead City University
Abstract
With the intention of alleviating the problems of inability to read efficiently among senior secondary school students in Oyo State schools, this study was undertaken to determine the suitability of the comprehension passages in the English Language textbook for senior secondary school ii. The passages were subjected to various readability tests: sentence length: lexical density, syntactic complexity and cloze deletion. Questionnaires were also used to determine the level of teachers influence on the problem. One thousand five hundred students from 288 schools across the three senatorial districts were used. One hundred and twenty English Language teachers responded to the questionnaires. The results of the tests and the responses to the
questionnaires were analyzed using text readability consensus calculator; simple percentage, correlation and regression analyses. The findings from the analyses showed that the passages on average (i) contain sentences with twenty words per sentence (ii) Are 55% lexically dense (iii) That the degree of syntactic complexity is 81% (iv)That most of the students were reading the passages at frustration level. The result of the hypotheses tested revealed that at (P ≤ 0.05) with p value of .890 there was significant relationship between readability indices and students’ achievement in comprehension test, also at p value of .546 there was moderate positive relationship between Teachers’ factors and students’ achievement in comprehension test. Precisely, the overall result of the findings showed that the textbook analyzed is not suitable for the target students. Based on these findings, it was recommended that: the passages in the analyzed textbook should be given to readability experts for adjustment; recommendation of textbook for students should be guided by readability tests. In addition more English Language Teachers should be employed into Public Secondary Schools in Oyo state.
Keywords: Readability, Lexical Density, Syntactic complexity, Sentence Length
Word Count: 287
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Keywords
Readability, Lexical Density, Syntactic complexity, Sentence Length
Citation
Kate Turabian