The Impact of Verb Tenses Instruction on Students’ Academic Achievements in Essay Writing in Senior Secondary Schools in Bauchi State, Nigeria

Isah Abubakar Kumbi, Shuaibu Adamu, Adamu Usman

Abstract


This work investigates the impact of verb tenses on the achievements of students essay writing in six selected secondary schools in Bauchi state. Principally this study aims at unveiling how teachers teach essay writing paired with verb tense instructions, with the view of finding out if the tense instruction improves students essay writing in English language. The reason for this work is connected with the poor writing habits of students, right from secondary schools up to tertiary institutions, which may be as a result of poor reading habits and poor grammar and punctuation instructions. The significance of this study is unveiling the importance of tense instructions in relation to students’ achievements in essay writing. Methodologically, the design of this study shall be a mixed research design, as it involves both quantitative and qualitative approach. The population entails all the senior secondary students (1500) and English teachers (20) in the selected senior secondary schools. The 306 students and 19 teachers is drawn using simple random sampling sample technique and the sample size is estimated using the research advisor table of sampling (2006). Test and questionnaire were the methods of data collection. The data gotten through test is analyzed using students’ T-test by excel, as well as error analysis, while data collected through questionnaire is analyzed using tables and mean. The theoretical frame work used was error analysis and communicative teaching theory. The findings of this work showed that there is significant relationship between communicative language teaching, verb tense instruction and students’ performances in essay writing, meaning communicative language teaching and verb tense instruction enhance students’ performance in essay writing thus, improving their performances. The findings would be useful to both teachers, students, researchers, government and relevant education agencies as it would be used to solve students’ essay-tenses related problems and as well how to improve it. By extension, this study is of benefit to curriculum developers as well as planners in Nigeria and the world at large as it would help in proper placement of tenses and essay writing in the syllabus.


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