Dr. Segun Kola Omotosho

Though reading is a true cognitive tool and is crucial to overall academic success at schools, recent studies have shown that students' performance in English language reading comprehension is declining, as noted in the Chief Examiner’s Reports by the West African Examinations Council. It is against this premise that this study examined the extent to which schema activation and collaborative group sharing strategies could be used to improve senior secondary school students’ academic achievement and attitude towards English language reading comprehension using gender and home background as moderating variables.

This study adopted a 3x2x2 factorial matrix in a pretest, posttest, quasi-experimental research design. One hundred and twenty-four (124) participants in Senior Secondary School II made up the sample size. The participants were drawn from three (3) senior secondary schools in Ijebu North Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria. Participants' information was gathered using three validated tools and eight weeks were used for the gathering of data. Descriptive statistics, Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) and Tukey post-hoc test were used to analyse the collected data. 

The findings showed significant effect of schema activation and collaborative group sharing strategies and attitude on students’ academic achievement and attitude. The study concluded that schema activation and collaborative group sharing strategies applied to teaching reading comprehension proved effective, efficient and can facilitate English language instruction. The study recommended these learner-centred instructional strategies for English Language Teaching. Also, parents should monitor the reading habits of their children at home; and increase sensitisation of the benefits of reading for students. Ministries of Education should organise periodic seminars, workshops and conferences for English as a Second Language teachers in partnership with relevant stakeholders in the education sector in order to expose them to effective instructional methods and improve teaching outcomes.