CHAPTER ONE
- INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL BACKGROUND
Attention has been given to the reading problems of students in Nigeria. One major reason for this is that there has been a lot of misconception and lack of understanding and agreement about what reading is and how it should be done.
In Nigeria, reading is perceived as verbalization of the written symbols. This perception of reading underscores the belief that whoever can read is acquiring knowledge. it is assumed that skills for activity has been learnt during the primary education when people were taught alphabets and how to read word recognition. This category of people have failed to realize that reading is more than mere reading of printed words on a page of paper.
Thus narrow perception of what reading is does not give direction to the appreciation of reading as response orientated.
English language is the official language of Nigeria and Nigerians learnt it, as a second language. This, no doubts has affected many individuals capacities for reading and performance in academic studies. Students are faced with volume of work that should be read with comprehension and speed if they have to pass well in their examination but quiet often students in most schools bring with them reading habits/skills which have hardly been develop and some with bad reading habits which have not been corrected. This problem is compounded by the fact that after the secondary education most people never again have a formal reading lesson even though the ability to learn a clearly significant factor of developing reading increase with maturity.
A person proficiency in reading to generally judge by the fluency, speeding word recognition and the ability to comprehend the reading materials.
The need for a proper guidance becomes necessary for lecturers to help their student develop those skills that could be for them such skills include:
- Ability to identify main ideas
- The ability to identify the topic sentence
- The ability to follow verbal direction links between words and ideas
- The ability to follow organizational pattern for the students to attain these skills. They need to develop the right attribute towards reading.
A lot of scholars have emphasized the importance of reading.
Reading is a part of everyday living that one can hardly imagine modern life without it. The recognition of this fact was ascertained by Thomas Jefferson, one time president of America who writes in one of this letters that people who read can be free because reading banishes ignorance and superstition. He went further to say where the press is free and every man is able to read, then all is safe.
Reading is the care of language learning. It is the central able to read printed materials, he or she begins to communicate with deals of information. However depends greatly on his reading skill which needs to develop since it is not natural.
- STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.
It has been shown that the all the language skill, reading, the view is widespread among teachers, lecturers that Nigerian students have poor reading skills which is to say that they are poor readers.
They have difficulty with comprehension, especially when the failure rate in West African Examination Council (WAEC) has been associated with some reading difficulties.
This situation calls for close examination with a view to finding the factors that accounts for the poor reading habits. To this end, the study will attempt to find answers to the following research question.
- How do student perceive reading
- What is their attitudes towards reading
- What among the student of Federal Polytechnic Nekede Owerri.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.