Assessing Punctuation Errors Made by Secondary School Students in English Language Comprehension in Ogun State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study assessed the errors in English comprehension by Senior Secondary School Students. Errors in Englishpunctuation in this study were categorized as mechanical errors in comprehension with particular emphasis onpunctuation marks and spelling. This study adopted a descriptive research design of ex-post-facto type. The targetgroups for the study were Ogun State Secondary Schools in Nigeria. The samples were drawn from four (4)geo-political zones in Ogun State of Nigeria (Ijebu, Remo, Yewa and Egba). Multi-stage stratified samplingtechnique was used to select five co-educational Secondary Schools from the four geo-political zones. Five schoolswere selected with fifty (50) Secondary Students III (SSS 3) per school totaling two hundred and fifty (250) male andfemale students in each of the divisions. Two instruments, Errors in English Language Comprehension (EELC), andan achievement test in English Language Punctuation (ATELP) were used to collect data from the one thousand(1000) students who were randomly sampled as participants. The validity and reliability of the instrument weredetermined by trial testing. The data were subjected to Chi-square, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and PearsonProduct Moment Correlation coefficient. The data were tested for significance at the 0.05 level. Based on thefindings, it was detected that students made more errors in punctuation than in spellings. This could be attributed tolack of knowledge and understanding of common mistakes made in English. Part of the recommendations made wasthat; teachers should concentrate on areas of difficulties such as comma, colon and semi-colon for students.