Effect of Phonemic Transcription-Based Strategy on Oral English Performance of L2 Learners among Senior Secondary Schools in Bida Education Zone of Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper attempted studying the effect of phonemic transcription-based teaching strategy on the Oral English performance of senior secondary students in Niger State, Nigeria. Two (2) objectives of finding out the effect of phonemic transcription-based teaching strategy on the oral English performance the identified research subjects in terms of consonant articulation and examining the effect of phonemic transcription-based teaching strategy on the oral English performance in terms of vowels articulation guided the study. Two corresponding research questions and null hypothesis were formulated an tested in the study. The study used the pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental design. Two purposively sampled schools totaling 120 SSII students constituted the sample for the study based on the intact class principle. A modified instrument of 0.77 split-half reliability tagged “Modified Oral English Performance Test” (MOEPET) adapted by the researchers from the National Examination Council Test of Oral Question format was used for data collection. The data collected were analyzed statistically using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). At the descriptive level, the research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation; while at the inferential level, both hypotheses were tested using t-test at 0.5 level of significance. The findings from this study indicated that the students taught using PT-BTS exhibited improvement in such vowel sounds as: / e /, / ʌ /, / ei /,/ eə /,/aʊ/, /ɒ / and distinctive articulation of the voiceless dental fricative consonant /θ/ from voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ with which it  is often interchanged. They also displayed distinctive articulation of the voiceless alveolar fricative consonant /s/ in the environment of voiced alveolar fricative consonant /z/, in contrast to their counterparts in the control group. The study concluded that, phonemic transcription-based teaching strategy awakened and simplified learning of Oral English for the L2 learners exposed to it. The study recommended that teachers should drill their students on segmental phonemes to prepare them for the rigours of spoken communication using interesting and pedagogic enough strategies like the PTBTS.