EFFECT OF GROUP DISCUSSION ON SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AND RETENTION IN KEFFI, NASARAWA STATE

This study investigated the effect of groupdiscussion on senior secondary school students’ English language comprehension achievement and retention in Nasarawa state. Three research questions and three null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a quasi-experimental research design which involves the non-randomized pretest, posttest, post posttest, control group design. The populations of the study consist of 24,545, SS 2 students duly registered in public secondary schools in 2018/2019 academic session in Nasarawa State and 140 SS2 English language students from 2 public senior secondary schools (80 males and 60 female) were used as a sample of the study using lottery method. A 30 items entitled “English Language Comprehension Achievement Test (ELCAT) was used for data collection. ELCAT was subjected to two expert’s judgment for face and content validation. The logical consensus of the experts yielded 0.82 indexes, and the reliability of the instrument was determined using KR20 which gave r0.79 index. Means and standard deviations were used to answer the research questions while ANOVA and t-test were used to test the null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significant. The findings of the study reveal that students that were taught English language reading comprehension in group discussion method performed better than those taught in conventional teaching method, students in experimental group had more retentive capacity than their counterparts in conventional group and both male and female students in discussion group achieved higher than male and female students in conventional group. It was therefore recommended that: English language teachers should use group-discussion method to teach students in secondary schools especially during reading comprehension and both male and female students should be encouraged to read in group in order to improve their reading culture and retentive capacity