Investigating the Impediments to Reading Comprehension in Junior Secondary Schools: Evidence from JSSII Students in Nsukka Metropolis

Abstract

There has been an outcry concerning Junior Secondary School students’ abysmal performance in reading comprehension in internal and external examinations in Nsukka Metropolis; hence, the reason to investigate the factors responsible for this abysmal performance becomes necessary. We adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population of this study comprises one hundred (100) Junior Secondary School II students from five (5) randomly selected secondary schools in Nsukka Metropolis. The sampling technique which the researchers adopted was the simple random sampling and utilized questionnaire as research instrument which was developed on a 4-point scale of strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree and disagree. Again, a reading comprehension test was administered to the students for correlational purposes. Statistical analysis was used. The findings showed that students performed very poorly in reading comprehension as a result of inadequate and unqualified language teachers, inadequate instructional materials, poor educational background of both students and parents, and the language style and background of some comprehension texts. The implication is that students’ comprehension ability maybe determined by their ability to recognize individual words in a passage or text, group words into units and relate those units into meaningful sentences or paragraphs. When students are able to do the above, they will surely have a meaningful comprehension of a text at these three distinct levels of comprehension: (i) factual; (ii) interpretative; and (ii) evaluative. Thus the researchers made strong suggestions and recommendations that would mitigate these problems.