Influence of Teaching methods on students’ Perfomance in Kiswahili Poetry in Secondary Schools in Lugari Sub-County Kenya

Abstract

The 2002 revised curriculum for Kiswahili for secondary school education in Kenya incorporated content on poetry. Students have continually performed poor in Kiswahili paper 102/3 in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) with the poetry section being the most failed. The purpose of thestudy was to investigate the influence of instructional methodology on students' performance in poetry in Kiswahili in Kenyan secondary schools, taking acase of Lugari Sub-County. The objective of this paper is to present and discuss the research findings onthemethods and teaching resources used by teachers of Kiswahili in teaching poetry. The study was based on Dale’s cone of experience theory which states that learners retain more information by what they ‘’do’’ as opposed to what they ‘’hear’’, ‘’read’’ or ‘’observe.’’ The studyadopted a survey research design. Ittargeted secondaryschools in Lugari Sub-County, Kakamega County in Kenya. The researcher used stratified sampling to place schools into three strata; four schools per strata were sampled making a total of twelve schools with twelve teachers of Kiswahili from the sampled schools. Purposive sampling was used to sample Form Three students. Data were collected using two sets of questionnaires, observation checklist, and document analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to analysethe obtained data and findings placed under themes. It was found that oral questioning and lecture methods dominated poetry in Kiswahili lessons. Therefore, theresearch recommendsthat teachers of Kiswahili should explore a variety of interactive teaching methods to enhance students’ mastery of content.