EFFECT OF REFLECTIVE INQUIRY INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNIQUE ON STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN ENGLISH ESSAY WRITING IN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN NSUKKA EDUCATION ZONE, ENUGU STATE. NIGERIA.

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of this study was to determine the effect of reflective inquiry instructional technique on students’ achievement in essay writing in senior secondary schools. The study was guided by five research questions and five null hypotheses. The study adopted a quasi-experimental research design. The study was carried out in Nsukka Local Government Area which is one of the Local Governments that made up Nsukka Education Zone in Enugu State, Nigeria. The population of the study was made up of 5381 senior secondary school II students of Nsukka Local Government Area both in urban and rural areas. The study sample consisted of 173 senior secondary 2 English language students made up of 78 male students and 95 female students.The sample was purposively selected from 4 public co-educational secondary schools. A research instrument was developed by the researcher for the study titled English Essay Writing Achievement Test (EEWAT). The reliability of the EEWAT was determined using data got from thetrial testing done in a school outside the study area but within the same educations zone so as to allow for similar characteristics among schools used. The scripts were scored by three people.To avoid the error of non-equivalence and reduce the initial group differences due to the non-randomization of subjects and to establish scorers’ reliability among raters, the scores of the different raters were correlated using Kendell coefficient of concordance with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). This yielded a coefficient of 0.810 which is approximately 0.81. This showed that the instrument was highly reliable.Mean scores and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions. The hypotheses were tested using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) at 0.5 level of significance. This helped to block off the effect of pretest on posttest. The result of the study,among others, showed that reflective inquiry instructional technique improved students’ achievement in essay writing than the lecture method. Finding also showed that reflective inquiry instructional technique improved the achievement score of both male and female students but favoured the female students more than the male students. It was also found that reflective inquiry instructional technique improved the achievement score of both students from urban and rural schools with the students from the urban schools achieving higher than the students from the rural schools. Conclusions were made, implications of the study were highlighted and it was recommended, among others, that English language teachers should endeavour to adopt the use of reflective inquiry instructional technique as it would enhance the overall achievement of students especially in essay writing. It was also recommended that regular sensitisation workshops should be organised to retrain English language teachers on the development and use of reflective inquiry instructional technique in teaching.