Teaching Styles and Language Performance. Towards a Development of an English Language Program

Abstract or Introduction

Maintaining quality instruction is the goal of every school to meet the challenges and demands of globalization, however, education nowadays faces a lot of challenges specifically on the area of language teaching. The risk of producing instructionally competent learners that is knowing the language but unable to use it communicatively, is a persistent and existing problem that had challenged every competent language teachers. Where should a competent language teacher start to address this gap? It needs planning and intervention, and, indeed, ushering this study to the fore.

Research proved that teaching styles can make or break the learning process. Hence, performance of learners must be geared towards a learning environment that is engaging, enjoyable and fruitful. Anchored on Invitational Theory, Cognitive Abilities Theory and Sociocultural Theory, this study sought to determine the teaching styles of grade 7 teachers and its relationship to the variation of language performance of grade 7 learners of Iligan City National High School. A Descriptive –correlational method was employed. To obtain the needed data, Teaching Styles Questionnaire for Teachers was administered to 9 Grade 7 English teachers and Module 1 Pre /Post-test from K-12 English Learners Material were administered to 971 grade 7 learners.

Findings revealed that dominant teaching style used were discussion, reflective and discovery methods. Though usage of other teaching styles came to the surface but there is no variation of teaching styles occurred resulting to a relatively low language performance. The skill of learners in listening is nearing mastery and least mastered for reading and writing. This reasonably showed that the demographic profile of the learners played significant factor to their language performance. Overall, respondents’ language performance is evidently related to teaching styles and disparity is apparent and needs to be addressed. With this prevalent finding, a Reading Development Program was crafted and recommended for implementation.