Abstract:
There is a perceived trend of poor academic achievement and interest of students in English Segmental Features in particular and Oral English in general in Nigerian schools today. This situation has been attributed to many factors one of which is poor teaching approach. Against this background, this study sought to assess the effect of intuitive-imitative approach on the academic achievement and interest of students in English segmental features in Nsukka Education Zone of Enugu State. It adopted a quasi experimental design. Six research questions and six null hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study comprised three thousand, eight hundred and seventy (3870) students in all the 47 government co-educational secondary schools in Nsukka Education Zone, Enugu State. Purposive sampling technique was used to select one hundred (100) students from two co-educational schools (52 students for experimental group (23 males and 29 females) and 48 students for control group (21 males and 27 females)) for the study. The instrument for data collection was English Segmental Features Achievement Test (ESFAT) and English Segmental Features Interest Inventory (ESFII). Mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions while analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at an alpha level of0.05. The results of the data analyzed revealed that there is a significant difference in the mean achievement and interest scores of students taught English segmental features using intuitive-imitative approach and those taught using analytic-linguistic approach in favour of the group taught English segmental features using intuitive-imitative approach. The result equally revealed that gender is not a significant factor in students’ achievement in English segmental features and that the intuitive-imitative approach is gender friendly. The null hypotheses tested revealed that gender is not significant on students’ interest in English segmental features. It was also found that there is no significant interaction effect between gender and instructional approach with respect to students’ achievement, but that there is a significant interaction effect between gender and instructional approach with respect to students’ interest in English segmental features. Based on these findings, some recommendations amongst others were made. English language teachers should acquaint themselves with the distinctive characteristics of intuitive-imitative in teaching the segmental features, school authorities should encourage students to watch news and listen to good newscasters and interact more often with their mates, as well as their teachers in standard English. This habit will make them better speakers of the language
