Impact Of Using Joint Productive Activity Approach On Second Language Learners’ Performance In Reading Comprehension At The Basic Education Level In Nigeria

This study investigated the impact of using joint productive activity on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension at the basic education level in Nigeria. A sample of forty (40) Junior Secondary II students from Kaduna North and South were used for the study. The study was quasi experimental. Government Junior Secondary School Doka was used as the experimental group while Government Junior Secondary School Makera was used as the control group. Both groups were assessed after six weeks of teaching using two reading comprehension tests. T-test was used to test the hypothesis raised in the study. The findings revealed significant differences in the performance of students taught reading comprehension using joint productive activity. Based on the findings teachers are encouraged to use joint productive activities in teaching reading comprehension. This is a positive deviation from the traditional practice in Nigeria where a teacher is regarded as the sole custodian of knowledge and students are empty tabula rasa who should be passive during class teaching. Teachers need to exploit this new approach by designing teaching comprehension activities that will require second language learners’ collaboration and active participation in accomplishing tasks jointly in class with the teacher.

that a civilized standard of living is not attainable without the ability to read, the need to undertake this study cannot be denied.

Review of Related Literature
Studies in the first language (Devine, 1981, Carroll, 1972) regarding the influence of different factors on reading achievement and comprehension have revealed that the situation is not same in the second language situation.Factors, which have been found to be significant in the first language situation, may not necessarily account for reading difficulties in a second language situation.For instance, many studies in the first language have emphasized the importance of home background, family size and parental concern for their children's progress in school (Thorndike, 1973).In a second language situation (such as teaching English in Nigeria), there are additional factors such as cultural factors, which impede the learners' reading achievement.Olaofe (2013) identifies the reading problems of secondary school students as slow, poor comprehension, poor recall, inadequate vocabulary, and inadequate reading interest.Crosscultural studies which have tried to compare the performance of Nigerian Students with that of their counterparts in developed countries depict a gloomy picture (Oyetunde 2009, Olaofe 2013).The influence of some of the factors may be greater in real terms today, given the condition of educational institutions in today's Nigeria.These factors include, according to Odumuh (1997), lack of qualified teachers, poor classroom condition, lack of adequate materials, large class size and little or no encouragement from parents, home, teacher and peer group.Most studies in reading comprehension so far conducted in Nigeria have concentrated on examining reading difficulty of students at the primary and junior secondary levels with focus on the texts being used.However, there are reasonable grounds to suspects that other non-text factors, such as pedagogical factors, affect reading comprehension as well.Literature search reveals that pedagogical factors have received little or no attention in Nigeria (Oyetunde 2009, Olaofe 2013).The absence of such crucial information constitutes a problem which has motivated the present study.The study is also based on the premise that the comprehension of a textbook depends on the interaction of a number of factors, which can be broadly categorized into four: socio-cultural, linguistic, psychological and pedagogical factors.The influence of these factors on the reader's comprehension especially in a second language situation is uncertain.There is, therefore, the need to ascertain the extent to which pedagogical factors influence reading comprehension.Doherty and Pinal (2002) and Tharp (2002) used standard performance to examine the influence of teachers' use of joint productive activity (JPA) during language arts instruction on the metacognitive development of predominantly Latino English language learners (ELL) during class instruction, the teacher and a small group of students co-construct meaning from a text.The teacher is a full collaborator in the activity, modelling the use of effective reading comprehension strategies while assessment and assisting students' comprehension efforts.This study found the use of cognitive reading strategies through teacher's use of JPA facilitated students' comprehension.JPA was unrelated to self-report of ineffective achievement gains on standardized comprehension achievement.The focus of this study, therefore, is to determine the impact of joint productive activity method on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension at the basic education level in Nigeria.The basic education is the bedrock upon which the secondary and tertiary levels are dependent.If this foundation level is faulty, students are bound to have difficulty in comprehending texts at the secondary school level and even beyond tertiary institutions.To this end this study will focus on one out of the five pedagogic methods of the centre for Research on Education Diversity and Excellence (CREDE) based in the United States of America i.e Joint Productive Activity (JPA).These pedagogic methods have proved successful over several decades across grade levels, student populations and content areas.Doherty & Pinal 2002, Doherty, Hilberg, Epaloose & Tharp 2002).This present sought to test one out of the five methods i.e Joint Productive Activity (JPA) to find out if it is likely to be effective in teaching reading comprehension to second language learners at the basic education level in Nigeria.

Objective of the Study
The objective of the study is to determine the impact of using joint productive activities on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension at the basic education level in Nigeria.

Research Question
What is the impact of joint productive activity on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension at the basic education level in Nigeria?

Hypothesis
Joint productive activity has no significant impact on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension at the basic education level in Nigeria.

Methodology
The subject of the study were forty (40) students of Junior Secondary II from Government Junior Secondary School (GJSS) Doka in Kaduna North and Government Junior Secondary School (GJSS) Makera in Kaduna South.Twenty (20) students from each school.The two schools were located far apart to minimise interaction.The two teachers who taught the classes were judged to be comparable in teaching ability, on the basis of their equivalent qualification as Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) holders.Government Junior Secondary School, Doka was used as the experimental group while Government Junior Secondary School, Makera was used as the control school.The students in both schools were taught for six weeks.Two reading comprehension tests were administered to the students.The reading comprehension tests were taken from the students' text titled Junior Secondary English Project Book 2. The comprehension questions were designed by the researcher so as to include literal questions, inferential questions and critical questions.

Research Design
A quasi experimental non randomization control design was used.A pre-test post-test design was adopted.A pre-test was administered prior to the commencement of teaching (treatment) in order to establish the homogeneity of the students.A post-test was administered after six weeks of teaching to determine any probable changes in the experimental group.More questions were included in the post test since it was felt that by the end of the 6 weeks of teaching, the students would have been more familiar with the passage.

Instrumentation
The instruments used for the study were reading comprehension passages from which test items were drawn on joint productive activities critical thinking skills.Six passages were carefully selected from the Junior English Project for Junior Secondary Schools Book 2 text in use in the schools.The passages were selected because of its relevant subject matter and interest to both gender.The content of the passage was educative and informative and adequately provided some of the needed items for the tests.

Administration of instruments
A pre-test on two passages was administered to both control and experimental groups to establish the homogeneity of the students.The experimental group was taught reading comprehension using joint productive activities for six weeks while the control group had their normal reading comprehension lessons taught by their teacher.A post-test (on the same two passages) was administered on the two groups after six weeks of teaching to determine the impact of joint productive activities on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension.T-test was used to test for significant difference in the performance of students from both groups.  1 and 2 shows the performance of students in the pre-test and post-test for the experimental and control groups for test 1 and 2.

Treatment
To test the hypothesis which states that joint productive activity has no significant impact on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension at the basic education level, the t-test was used.The summary of computations are shown in table 3 and 4.  3, the observed t-values were found to be significant at 0.05.Hence, the null hypothesis which states that there is no significant impact of the joint productive activity approach on the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension is rejected and one could conclude that there was significant improvement on the performance of the second language comprehension using the Joint Productive Activity approach.4, the observed t-values were found not to be significant at 0.05.Hence one can say that the traditional method has no significant impact on performance of second language learners in reading comprehension.
One can thus conclude that the JPA is relatively more effective in teaching second language learners reading comprehension.Since this group of students performed significantly better than those taught using the traditional method in the two reading comprehension tests.The post-test results, however, showed a general improvement as both groups performed better in the post-test than they did in the pre-test, which is probably as a result of instruction, since both groups were exposed to six weeks teaching.

Discussion of Findings
There is a general increase in the level of involvement and participation of the second language learners on the JPA in the experimental group probably because of the activities students were engaged in.Students and teachers were actively involved in the discussion of the passages before they were read.In the JPA lessons that were observed, second language learners generally showed keen interest in the discussion.Each student was eager to share his/her own experiences with the class.The students that were taught using the traditional method were not exposed to any Joint Productive tasks.Students' performances in the two (2) tests were generally low not because they lacked ability or because they are poor readers but probably because students were not involved actively in joint productive activity with their teacher.They were passive most of the time.
It is also interesting to note that the JPA group also performed better in the reading comprehension tests.Students performed very well in literal inferential and critical questions.Their scores were higher than those of the traditional group.This goes to confirm the studies of Doherty, Hilberg, Epaloose and Tharp (2002), Doherty and Pinal (2002), Mansur and Pantea (2012) which all point to the fact that the use of Joint Productive Activity Approach helps students to jointly select important information from the text and also encourages them to make use of their natural abilities to make and confirm predictions as they read and perform reading tasks jointly with their teachers.Teachers should therefore try as much as possible to design instructional activities that will require students' collaboration to accomplish tasks jointly with the teacher.Students stand to benefit a lot if they are actively engaged or involved in joint productive activities with their teachers.

Conclusion
Based on the empirical evidence presented, the JPA group has gained more than the conventional group.Thus the performance of second language learners in reading comprehension using joint productive activity approach was greatly enhanced and improved.This researcher therefore joins other researchers like Doherty and Pinal (2002), Doherty, Hilberg, Epaloose and Tharp (2002) in saying that the use of Joint Productive Activity is a positive deviation from the traditional practice where a teacher is regarded as the sole custodian of knowledge and students are merely regarded as empty "tabula rasa" or "clean slates" waiting to be written on.This approach needs to be exploited by all teachers.
Students would definitely benefit more if teachers exploit this approach.Prospective researchers would surely benefit from this study by carrying out more investigations that would improve the teaching of reading comprehension using joint productive activity approach at the basic education level.This will go a long way to enhance and improve the performance of second language learners in English, since reading is one of the fundamental skills in language acquisition and learning and it is indispensable in academics and lifelong learning.

Recommendations
The following recommendations were made based on the findings of the study.1.
The school system in Nigeria should empower language and content areas teachers to be able to equip second language learners with the required attitude, knowledge, instructional practices and skills that will enable them meet the literacy demands of the 21 st century.The school system should expose second language learners to instructional practices that promote responsive interaction between teachers and learners such as JPA. 2.
Teachers should be ready to implement joint productive activities by engaging all students in meaningful activities to facilitate second language learners' reading comprehension.These activities should be carried out jointly by teachers and learners in order to obtain meaningful results.

3.
The use of JPA by teachers will change the role of the teacher in the classroom from that of a sole custodian of knowledge to a facilitator of learning by encouraging and helping learners to accomplish reading tasks jointly.

4.
Teaching and learning should be student centred not teacher centred.There should be change or shift of focus from the teacher to the learners since the current trend in teaching is emphasising more of students' active participation rather than teacher centred orientation.5.
Teachers should always design instructional activities in reading comprehension that will require students' collaboration in accomplishing reading tasks jointly.Such activities should include dramatization, demonstration, miming, sketching and so on.6.
Teachers should always make sure in using joint productive approach that they organise second language learners in a variety of groupings such as mixed academic ability, reading ability, interest e.t.c to promote meaningful interaction.7.
Text book writers in English language for basic education should include joint productive activities as part of the exercises for reading comprehension.8.
Curriculum planners should include joint productive activities as part of the students' activities to be carried out in the reading component of the English language curriculum for basic education.

Table 3 .
comparison of pre-test and post-test scores for students in the Joint Productive Activity Approach (