The State of Reading in Selected Secondary Schools in Oyo State, Nigeria

The paper is a survey of reading in selected secondary schools in Oyo State, Nigeria. It covered schools selected across the three senatorial zones of the State. In undertaking the study, the researcher with the support of research assistants first observed the teachers and students in the schools in their reading activities and later administered a self-designed questionnaire on them. The questionnaire sought information on the reading related activities of teachers and students as well as the availability or otherwise of materials to facilitate reading in the schools concerned. Descriptive statistics of frequency and percentage counts were used to analyse the data generated from the study. The outcome of the study revealed that reading is not given adequate attention in the schools the way it ought to, all the subject teachersdo not handle the teaching of reading while the reading activities in theschool are left to the discretion of students. Among the teachers who giveattention to reading, we found a majority of them who failed to give students the necessary motivation to strengthen their interest in reading. It was also found out that most school heads contributed to the poor reading culture of the students by their attitude to issues that bother on reading and how it can be promoted in their schools. This is because most of the schools have no functional libraries and other facilities that can promote effective reading of reading. Based on the foregoing, adequate recommendations that would promote reading at the secondary school level in the State have been made in the paper

Resources and Resourcefulness in Language Teaching and Learning

A resource is ‘money, material and other asset that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively. Resourcefulness, on the other hand, is the quality of being able to cope with a difficult situation in one’s attempt at succeeding. Attempts will be made in this paper to examine what we mean by language, language teaching and learning, resources and resourcefulness in language teaching and learning and the benefit of teachers being resourceful in language teaching and learning to both the learners, the teachers, the society and the nation at large. It is expected that a discussion based on these concepts will help us to have a greater appreciation of the enormity of the challenges that language teachers face in their efforts at teaching and promoting the learning of their subjects in schools

Making Omelette without Breaking Eggs: Improving the Reading Comprehension Skills of English as a Second Language Teachers in Nigeria Secondary Schools

One of the important language skills teachers are expected to master and teach their students is how to develop comprehension skills and comprehend whatever they read, be able to recall information and apply such-appropriate comprehension skills later in life Unfortunately, teachers in secondary schools in Nigeria do not seem to have fully mastered the skills and techniques of impacting appropriate comprehension knowledge and skills into their students. Thus, most secondary schools students are not able to comprehend effectively, do not perform well in comprehension tests and subsequently do not do well in most situations where comprehension skills are required. Asking teachers to facilitate the acquisition of comprehension skills by students when they themselves do not know whether to teach or test comprehension skills is akin to wanting them to make omelette without breaking eggs. Therefore, in order to have a firsthand information on strategies teachers adopt in impacting the knowledge of comprehension skills into their students, this study, through observation and verification, examines what teachers of comprehension actually do in impacting the knowledge of comprehension in their students in selected secondary schools in Ibadan, and makes recommendations on what should be included in the curricula of teacher preparation programmes in Nigeria with a view to helping teachers of English as a Second Language to acquire appropriate strategies of handling comprehension lessons and ultimately facilitating, in their students, effective acquisition of comprehension skills