Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

Date of this Version

9-2021

Abstract

Children libraries are libraries established in schools to support learning and teaching activities of pupils. In order to inculcate a good reading culture in pupils, they have to be encouraged to make reading part of their everyday life. Storybooks are useful for introducing new words, concepts and ideas into children’s language development, world and imagination. The purpose of the study was to ascertain the influence of storybooks at children's libraries on reading culture among primary classes 4 and 5 pupils in public schools and find out the influence of gender on pupils’ reading culture when exposed to storybooks. A quasi-experimental research design was adopted for this study. A total of 35 pupils were assigned to the experimental group while 34 pupils were assigned to the control group. Mean, standard deviation and analysis of covariance were used to analyze data. The results of the study show that storybooks improve the reading culture of pupils in public primary schools. Also, gender did not influence the mean reading culture scores of the pupils after exposure to the storybooks approach, F (1, 68)=.638, p=.427, partial eta squared= .010. There was also no significant interaction effect of methods and gender on the pupils’ mean reading culture, F (1, 68)=.184, p=.669. Therefore, exposing pupils to storybooks can help improve their culture of reading. The study recommends among others that there should be more storybooks at children's libraries in order to enhance the reading culture of pupils in public primary schools in the study area.

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