Poor teaching methods are blamed for a large number of Nigerian pupils in government schools becoming either non-readers or struggling readers [20]. This study investigated the effects of a Reading Intervention that trained primary school teachers in specific strategies of teaching reading skills in order to enhance instructional practices. In a quasiexperimental design with 15 teachers and 140 primary pupils, teachers were trained for four weeks using activities derived from the whole language or literature-based approach. The teachers then trained pupils for eight weeks in reading skills in an afterschool programme. The reading assessment measured pupils' skills in oral language, print awareness, sight word recognition, phonemic awareness, and listening comprehension. Results of post-test showed progress in pupils' ability to express themselves in English; recognize a large number of sight words; generate language experience stories and read simple story books. Another outcome included production of storybooks from children's language experiences stories.
Reading is seen as a communication process, a meaningful interaction between the reader and his reading text. A number of factors are known to affect this interaction. One prominent factor is the type of text being read. That is, reader strategies may vary in relation to text characteristics. This study used miscue analysis to find out patterns of reader strategies on two types of texts: a syntactically complex and high vocabulary loaded text and a syntactically simple and low vocabulary loaded text. To this end, cloze tests of passages derived from two versions of a newspaper editorial completed by twenty undergraduate education students from the University of Jos were analysed. The results indicated that the readers of the difficult text had less access to semantic and syntactic cues than the readers of the simplified text. Readers for whom the difficult text was on frustration level made less use of context than did readers for whom the same text was on instructional level. There was very little difference in quality of miscues by readers of the simplified text reading on independent level as compared with those reading the same text on instructional level. Readers who performed on instructional level on the difficult passage used similar reading strategies to those who performed on instructional level on the simplified passage. The implications of the findings for reading instruction were discussed.
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