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Item Effects of Reading Fluency Instruction on Reading Comprehension: A Case Study of Koforidua Senior High Technical School(University of Ghana, 2020-01) Asinyor, E.Research on reading has indicated that children who fail to achieve reading competence in their early grades experience reading comprehension difficulties later in the upper levels of education. Owing to such reasons, many senior high school (SHS) students in Ghana are not able to cope with high learning that demands reading, and they lack comprehension strategies aimed at helping them construct meaning from text. Reading fluency, with its components such as reading sub skills and comprehension skills (as conceptualized by Samuels 2002), has had a very little attention in the Ghanaian educational system as a reading comprehension instruction approach, though this approach has gained international recognition as a predictor of comprehension. The study sought to examine the effectiveness of reading fluency skills instruction as a means of improving reading comprehension in SHS struggling readers. The study adopted a nonrandomized control group pre-test-post-test design in the data collection process. It used 120 participants made up of two Form One classes from Koforidua Senior High school in the Eastern Region of Ghana, and administered pre-test and post-test to both experimental and control groups, and intervention to the experimental group. The study investigated three main variables, namely, reading sub skills, comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge. Under sub skills, reading rate (WCPM), word reading accuracy (WRA), real word reading (RWR), pseudo word reading (PWR) and phonemic awareness (PA) were evaluated. For comprehension skills, ‘big idea’ strategy, ‘right there’, ‘putting it together’, ‘making connections’, ‘main idea’ strategy and ‘text summary’ strategy (Denton et al. 2007) were assessed. Lastly, the participants were assessed on vocabulary knowledge. Reading fluency skills instruction promoted significant and positive associations involving all the reading sub skills variables in the experimental group. After the exposure to a regular classroom instruction programme, the control group had only one significant positive association involving reading rate and word reading accuracy. The experimental group showed significant associations involving three of the comprehension variables, namely, ‘big idea’, ‘right there’ and ‘making connections’ (Dention et al. 2007), while the control group showed associations involving two comprehension strategies, ‘right there’ and ‘making connections’ (Denton et al. 2007). The correlation analysis showed that reading fluency skills instruction has a significant and positive connection with reading sub skills improvement; indicating that reading sub skills have a higher comprehension predicting ability when compared with comprehension skills/strategies. The literature indicates that reading comprehension intervention that takes care of students’ sub skills needs at the senior high school level in Ghana is virtually unavailable. The study, therefore, proposes a technique that handles reading comprehension instruction from the sub skills level to the comprehension skills level. This approach will arm students with the necessary reading sub skills for both word and sentence processing before they complement them with comprehension strategiesItem Impact of Corrective Feedback on the Writing of Business Communication Students in Selected Tertiary Institutions in Ghana.(University of Ghana, 2017-07) Owusu, E.This research work examines the impact of corrective feedback (CF) on the writings of business communication students in selected tertiary institutions in Ghana. In Ghana, CF is one area in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) that has not received much attention. Both empirical and theoretical literature were reviewed. Noticing and Swain’s Comprehensible Output Hypotheses were the two theoretical underpinnings the research adopted. The design of the research was sequential exploratory mixed methods approach. The field data (students’ texts and questionnaire items) were collected from Ho, Koforidua, Kumasi, and Sunyani Technical Universities. From each of the universities, the respondents were segmented into three groupings – Direct Feedback (DF), Indirect Feedback (IF), and No Feedback (NF) groups. One hundred (100) student-respondents were targeted from each of the 4 universities, but a 60 percent response rate each was attained. Each student-participant composed 4 texts before the questionnaires were administered. A total of 1280 sampled texts were used. After the pre-tests were conducted at each university sequentially, three interventions (DF, IF, and NF) were used on the pre-test texts of the various groups of the student-respondents before they took the post-tests. The result of the study showed that CF in general has positive impact on students’ texts. The research further revealed that DF and IF interventions correct memorandum and business letter errors better than the NF. However, the potency of the DF intervention was stronger than that of the IF. Therefore, the thesis recommends that teachers of Business Communication should use DF or IF interventions in assessing students’ texts; and NF should only be used as a prelude of DF or IF.Item Towards A Theory of the Colonialist Novel: Caving, Caging, Theft and Voicing as a Structural Grammar(University of Ghana, 2017-07) Amissah-Arthur, J. BThe English novel was born a colonialist literary production. From its earliest beginnings in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) through its nineteenth-century realisations in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887) to its twentieth-century forms such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956), the English novel has been closely associated with the rise of the British Empire. The colonialist novel, novels written by British colonisers who came to Africa, is therefore an integral subset of the English novel. The present study seeks to interrogate the colonialist novel in order to find out how colonialism has been socially organised in the genre. We seek to discover the structural formulations that make the story of the colonialist novel possible. The thrust of the study is motivated by two key problems identified in the existing scholarship on the English novel and structural theory. First, the distinguished Terry Castle (2002) suggests that critical ideas on the early English novel have been exhausted, and that nothing new can be discovered about the novel. Second, Firdous Azim (1993) emphasises that criticism on the colonialist novel is lopsided as it stops at the social, thematic level. She bemoans the dearth of the structuralist methodology in the study of the genre. We find in Castle’s and Azim’s positions a conundrum and motivation respectively. First, Castle’s proclamation seems hasty and unjustified, especially, in the light of Azim’s observation. Second, Azim’s profound discovery of the lack of the structutalist methodology in the study of the colonialist novel exposes a gap in scholarship that must be filled. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh iii In view of the the problems identified above, the study provides a structural study of the colonialist novel with an emphasis on the story – and not on the discourse. The story of the novel represents the social matter while the discourse is the process by which the story is carried to the reader. Our study seeks to find out how the story of the colonialist novel is organised on the social level; in other words, how the structure of the story manifests in the social domain. The study is interested not merely in the politics of the story but more importantly in the structure of the story. Applying the Levi-Straussian paradigmatic strain of structural methodology, we examine a select set of seven colonialist novels, and reduce the plots of all seven texts to seven simple sentences or clauses. We then re-arrange the seven sentences to discover what formulaic relationships exist among them, keeping in mind that it is only as bundles of relations that the constituent units of a story can be combined to make a meaning (Levi-Strauss 1986). We make the following discoveries: that there is a grammar in the story of the colonialist novel; that the grammar is homological, and determines the chiasmic structure of the colonialist novel; and that there is a mirror line in the story which makes the chiasmic structure possible. In other words, the action of one part of the story is repeated in the other part, but in the inverse order, creating an object and mirror-image formulation. What this means is that the suffering experienced by the colonised African is eventually inverted against the coloniser. The significance of our study resides in its attempt to provide a new theory of the novel by examining the structural basis of the colonialist story. Our study is significant also because, by exposing the falsehood of the colonialist notion of co-victimhood, the supposed victimhood of both the colonised and coloniser, the study does not merely generate but also problematises the grammar of the colonialist story.Item Generic Moves in Selected M.Phil Research Proposals from a Public University in Ghana(University Of Ghana, 2017-07) Daniels, J.B.In the last few decades, genre scholars have shown considerable interest in using Swales’ modified version of the Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) model in analyzing academic genres such as the Research Article (RA) which is regarded as the lifeblood that sustains the academic community. Mono-disciplines and multi-sections of the RA such as the abstract, introduction, method, literature review have been duly studied. Despite the contribution of the Research Proposal (RP) to knowledge production, it has attracted relatively little attention in the existing literature. To bridge this gap, forty MPhil research proposals written by graduate students of a public university in two unrelated disciplines: English Language Studies (ELS) and Agricultural Science (AG) are randomly selected and analyzed based on the modified version of the CARS model and Halliday’s (1985) concept of linguistic choices available to users of a language. The study analyzed both the generic structures of the overall sections of research proposal and linguistic resources in terms of structural types of sentences found in the selected research proposals. Four key findings were made. First, the ELS researchers use six Moves while the AG researchers use five. Secondly, the ordering of the Moves in both sets of data does not follow a linear pattern, also the ELS researchers use more textual space than the AG researchers. Lastly, the analysis reveals other notable divergences and convergences between the two disciplines. The complex and simple sentences are most frequently used by researchers in both disciplines. Sentences selected by both groups of researchers range from one to three dependent clauses based on a number of reasons. The study found that the selected dependent clauses are of different types used in realizing each Move. The study has theoretical and pedagogical implications for future research on genre analysis.Item A Comparative Register Analysis of Editorials from Ghanaian and British Newspapers(University Of Ghana, 2015-07) Frimpong, G.K.This work is a corpus-based study of newspaper editorial language. It compares the usage of sentence types and clause patterns in newspaper editorials from native and nonnative English contexts. Using register theory (RT), and other theories which relate language to contexts of use and to communicative function, this work investigates the distribution of the two major grammatical structures across newspaper editorials from the two sociocultural contexts. The aim is to validate the central claim of RT that linguistic features within a given register are essentially similarly distributed across dialects of the same language because they are functional choices people make to fulfill communicative functions within a situational context. To this end, editorials from Ghanaian and British newspapers were explored using corpus methodology, which combined quantitative and qualitative principles with the hope of ascertaining the functional motivation behind the distribution of sentence and clause patterns in the editorial register. Our findings supported by a confirmatory statistical measurement at Pearson’s critical value of 0.05 supports the claim that linguistic features are similarly distributed across dialects of a given language in the sense that the complex declarative sentences and the nominal and relative clauses, which were the dominant sentence and clause patterns were similarly distributed across the two sociocultural contexts. Besides, these structures were noted to relate both to the production and comprehension circumstances and to the communicative purpose of the newspaper editorial register, a confirmation that linguistic features are functionally distributed in a situation of use.Item Teaching Reading Comprehension in Basic Two: A Case Study of the University Basic Schools, Legon(University of Ghana, 2013-12) Washington-Nortey, F. M.; SAAH, K.K.; SAANCHI, J.A.N.; University of Ghana, College of Humanities, School of Languages, Department of EnglishThe study examined the effect of the Schema Reading Approach on pupils in Basic Two (lower primary) in the University Basic Schools, Legon. It also explored the effect of two language teaching approaches, The Schema Reading Theory as against the Basal Reading Approach in teaching reading comprehension. It involved experiments on two different groups, the experimental and the control groups. A preliminary investigation and test were conducted before the experiments. Pre-test and post-test conducted to determine the outcome of the study was also performed before and after intervention lessons. The pupils were taken through either the Schema or the Basal Reading Approach in their classroom lessons and exercises to determine the outcome of the study. There were observation periods where classroom activities were monitored, a preliminary test and a pre and post intervention exercises on a selection of comprehension passages and other related activities from their English Reader. There were 142 pupils from four classes of Basic Two comprising 70 girls and 72 boys in the study. After being divided into the two groups, the pupils were taught using the approach assigned to them. Both groups were administered with the end-of-year Reading Comprehension Examination at the end of the final term. The scores from the pre-test were compared with the test scores from the post-test. The results showed that pupils taught with the Schema Theory performed significantly better than those taught through the Basal Reading Approach. Findings on the reading testify the assumption that the application of the Schema is beneficial to lower primary pupils‟ reading interest and understanding.Item Codeswitching in Academic Discussions: A Discourse Strategy by Students in the University of Education, Winneba(University of Ghana, 2013-07) Quarcoo, M.; Dako, K.; Amuzu, E.K.; Shoba, J.A.The purpose of this work is to investigate the use of codeswitching (CS) as a linguistic resource by students of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW). The study seeks to answer why students in the university conduct their academic discussions in CS contrary to what is expected of them; how the use of CS contributes to the overall meaning of the topics they discuss and how students use CS as a linguistic resource to negotiate their activities in the university community. The study focused on study groups at the South Campus of the University of Education, Winneba. The social network (Milroy 1980) and ethnographic research methods (Barton & Hamilton 1998) were employed for data collection and the Community of Practice concept of Wenger (1998) was used to describe the study groups. The Markedness model of Myers-Scotton (1993) and the Conversational Analysis of Auer (1984) were used to analyze the speech data. The study found that two types of CS operate on UEW campus. These are in-group CS and out- group CS. It found that Akan/English CS is the main language for many out-group interactions on campus and serves as a lingua franca in addition to English. It serves as a bridge language between Winneba town and the university. It is also used in many study groups to discuss academic work. Finally, it found that students do not have a positive attitude towards all the indigenous languages and non-Akan students protest the prevalence of Akan on campus. The study is significant because it will enable policy makers recognize that CS occurs at all levels of education and must be given the appropriate attention. It will also serve as a reference point for future research into language changes or shifts in Ghana. Finally, it will add to existing literature in the study of language use in education.