Content and Effectiveness of Instructional Radio Programmes for the Teaching of English in Ethiopian Elementary Schools (A Descriptive and Experimental Case Study)

Abstract

This thesis comprises of a descriptive and experimental study. The study has been conducted to investigate the content and test the
effectiveness of the English teaching radio programmes that arebroadcast to supplement the classroom English teaching. Each of the
grades from three to six, which are the grade levels for English in Ethiopian elementary schools, receives twenty six programmes in
twenty six weeks in one academic year. This study describes all the one hundred and four programmes aired for the four grade levels
mentioned above. The relationship of the English teaching radio programmes with the classroom items and/or the English curriculum
for the elementary schools has been looked into. The suitability of the selected items for radio presentation has also been seen in the
light of the lengthy theoretical discussion contained in Chapter II on the nature of radio as a teaching media and the principle of selection,
gradation, presentation and repetition for teaching English by radio.

The investigation thus carries out indicates that too many items are included (for the 15 minutes duration of each of the programmes) in
the radio programmes for grade three and four with continuing decrease in grades five and six - a trend that should have been reversed.The suitability for radio presentation of the items for grade three has been found to be satisfactory in that 116 of the 147 vocabulary items could be demonstrated by pictures and! or actions,objects, models. Again in here the degree of suitability for radio presentation of the selected items decreases in grades four, five and six.

The second part of this study describes thirty two (eight from each group) of the one hundred and four programmes for points considered
to be relevant for the programmes being effective to teach the items contained in the. This investigation indicates that the programmes
are loaded with rote repetition drills and long sentences for repetition exercises; contain too few cues for pupil overt responses.
The mode of presentation, however, has been found to be suitable for radio.

Furthermore, the same thirty-two programmes have also been tested in an actual classroom situation by comparisons of pre and post
broadcast oral test results of sampled students in three randomly selected elementary school in Bahir Dar town, Gojjam region. Two
tailed t-tests of significance run for the thirty two programmes indicate that twenty eight of them have been effective, both at .01
and .001. probability level, to teach the items contained in them. However, the writer has mentioned possible reasons for the success
indicated by the statistics and lists some recommendations that might help to upgrade the quality of the English teaching radio programmes
produced in the future.