IMPROVING STUDENTS’ SELF CONCEPT IN COMPREHENSION AND SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH TEACHING STRATEGIES AND COMIC PACKAGES

This paper looks into improving students’’ self-concept through teaching strategies and comic packages in comprehension and sentence construction in English language. As an experimental study, the study adopted a three-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. The population consisted of 16,477 Junior Secondary School students in Ekiti State during the 2016/2017 academic session. The sample consisted of 243 Junior Secondary class II students from six Junior Secondary Schools in Ekiti State. Four research instruments were used for data collection which were all validated and tested for reliability through the Crombach Alpha method of reliability. Data collected were analyzed using inferential statistics of ANCOVA to test the hypothesis formulated. Multiple Classification Analysis was used to determine the effect of treatment on adjusted post-test mean scores of respondents tested at 0.05 level of significance. Based on the findings of the study, it was concluded that self-concept is a very important factor which determines students’ success in every area of their lives, hence students should be helped to develop positive self-concept of themselves so that they see themselves as being able. It was recommended that teachers should collaborate with school administrators to plan various activities to support positive self perception for enhancing academic achievement and fix the kind of activities that will support both non academic and academic self-concept of students; ESL class settings should be arranged to allow students to increase their motivation and interests in such a way to help each other in order to foster the spirit of cooperation and team work, communication and interaction with colleagues and teachers in class as these could build their self-confidence and improve their self-image.