An investigation of a literature-based approach to reading: promoting peer assessment in the English access course at the University of Namibia

Abstract

High school leaving learners entering the University of Namibia face a lot of difficulties. Many of them feel threatened by the sheer quantum of reading that they are expected to do. They not only feel unsettled but also find it rather demotivating to read the prescribed academic texts in their English Access Course. The ensuing struggle they experience in such reading further diminishes their poor reading abilities, thereby severely impacting their overall academic performance in English. Given this background, I believe that the use of literature texts in their English Access Course can make their reading more enjoyable and motivating to them as literature texts are ideally suited to facilitating peer assessment and role-play after each reading. Such an educational practice can help create more highly motivated readers, who will be confident to use their accrued reading ability in tackling more complex academic texts during their time at the university. In light of this, my study investigates aspects of both the students and lecturers of the English Access course, predicated on a well-informed mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. This necessitated my using convenient and random sampling procedures to draw the sample from the population of the study. In this respect, I employed interviews, questionnaires, observation, pretest, posttest, and an assessment tool guide as data collection methods. The study also adopted a thematic approach for qualitative data analysis, where data was grouped into themes based on the research questions. Descriptive, inferential, and correlational statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data.