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.