Assessing teachers’ attitude and practice of using literary texts in teaching reading skills: the case of borena secondary and preparatory school in focus

The purpose of this study was to assess teachers’ attitude and practice of using literary texts in teaching reading skills at Borena Secondary and Preparatory School. Descriptive research design was employed to achieve the objectives of the study. English language teachers and students of Borena Secondary and Preparatory School were the participants of the study. Stratified and purposive sampling techniques in an integrative way were used to select 344 students among the total population of 2500. 9 English language teachers were also selected by using comprehensive sampling as sample participants of the study. Then, data was obtained via questionnaire, semi-structured interview and classroom observation. Questions were developed by the researcher and filled in to SPSS version twenty for their standards and administered to teachers and students. Semi-structured interview was conducted with English language teachers face to face. Actual classroom observations were conducted in the classrooms. Next, the data which were relevant to the research objectives were selected and analyzed. Thus, from the data analyses, different findings were obtained. The study uncovered that: teachers had negative attitude on the relevance of literary texts in teaching reading skills. In addition, teachers’ practice of using literary texts was very low; they had lack of practice of using literary texts in teaching reading skills. Towards the extent to which they use literary texts to make their students exercise for each types and strategies of reading, most of them did not use any literary texts out of the textbooks. In fact, they often used literary texts in the textbooks to make their students exercise skimming, scanning, summarizing and intensive reading only; however, the teachers did not adequately use these texts to engage their learners exercise the following important reading skills: extensive reading, inferring, questioning, predicting, making connection and visualizing. With regard to genres of literature teachers mostly use, poems were the most frequently used because of the fact that more than half of the total literary texts in the textbooks in teaching reading skills are poems. Based on the findings, the researcher recommended that the teachers should show their positive attitude for the use of literature in teaching reading skills and meaning full teaching of reading skills through literary texts should be practiced widely to develop learners’ reading comprehension ability.