Teachers’ competencies in reading pedagogy at secondary school level in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya

Abstract

Teachers require competencies in critical aspects of reading pedagogy including planning, teaching approaches, utilization of learning materials and assessment. However, the Kenya National Examinations Council has over the years raised concerns about teacher competencies in reading pedagogy considering the consistent poor performance in English language in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations: particularly in the papers that have components of reading. Yet, there are very minimal studies in Kenya that have specifically investigated this problem. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate Teachers’ Competencies in Reading Pedagogy at secondary school level in Uasin Gishu County in Kenya. The specific research questions were: What are the teachers’ competencies in planning for Reading pedagogy at secondary school level?;How do teachers’ demonstrate competencies in developing and utilizing materials for Reading pedagogy at secondary school level? ; How do teachers’ competencies in pedagogical approaches and assessment facilitate learning of Reading at secondary school level? The study was based on the Competency Based Language Teaching Theory. The study adopted a relativist- interpretivist philosophical paradigm and used the qualitative approach and case study design with a purposively sampled group of 32 teachers in 16 schools. Data was generated through in-depth interviews of teachers, classroom observations and analysis of teachers’ professional documents. The data was transcribed and analysed thematically and reported in line with the research questions. The main findings of the study were that: teachers mainly relied on textbooks while planning for reading pedagogy in the process excluding some prescribed content in the syllabus. Secondly, in terms of teaching and learning materials, teachers made very minimal effort at development and utilization of authentic communicative reading materials. Finally classroom teaching and assessment of reading demonstrated over-reliance on the question and answer technique and ignored other participatory approaches such as, pair work, group discussion and task based reading. Furthermore, the study revealed that teachers relied on questions already provided in the school texts and past papers in supplementary materials easily available in the market. Based on these findings, it was concluded that teachers’ competencies in reading pedagogy at secondary school level fail to meet the expectations of the syllabus as they only focus on learner development of low order reading skills such as recall, application and inferential comprehension and hardly include high order skills of analysis, synthesis, evaluation and creativity as required by the syllabus. Therefore, from this study it is recommended that teacher competencies in reading pedagogy be enhanced both during training and through continuous professional development courses to enhance high order reading skills of their learners.