ASSESSMENT OF THE LISTENING -ATTENTION SKILLS OF NURSERY SCHOOL PUPILS IN OSUN STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study assessed the level of listening skills and the influence of demographic variables on listeningattention skills of nursery school pupils in Osun State. The study adopted a survey research design. The study utilized 120 nursery school pupils. Multistage sampling procedure was used for the study. From the three senatorial districts in Osun State, two local government areas were selected from each senatorial district using simple random sampling technique totaling 6 local government areas. From each of the selected local government areas, two schools were selected, making 12 schools in Osun State. From each of the schools, five pupils were selected from nursery one and nursery two using purposive sampling technique because of their ages (age 4 – 6 years) levels are still within the range of developing listeningattention skills. One instrument entitled, Listening and Attention Achievement Test was used. The instrument consisted of two sections. Section A provided demographic characteristics information of the respondent while section B consisted of two comprehension passages which was read to the pupils by the researcher and thereafter pupils were asked questions under each comprehension passages to test their level of listening skills. Data collected were analyzed using percentages and analysis of variance to examine the influence of pupil's demographic information on their listening-attention skill. Results showed that there exists a high level of listening skills among nursery school pupils in Osun State as shown by 73.3% of the respondents and that the age of the pupils had no significant influence on their listeningattention skill showed by F-value of (0.899 at df (3), p>0.05). Also, sex of the pupils had no significant influence on their listening-attention skill showed by the F-value of 2.250 at df (1), p>0.05. It was recommended that Pupils should be exposed to more songs, stories, and reading activities both at school and home at an early stage to develop aural attentionlistening skills.