ABSTRACT
This study examined secondary school students' perception of the influence of Literature-in-English on their language proficiency and cultural awareness in Egor Local Government Area, Edo State, Nigeria. Two research questions were formulated and two hypothesis were tested to guide the study.
The descriptive survey research design was employed in the study. The study employed the Simple random sampling technique to choose 100 secondary school students. The computed sample size of 100 was based on a sample population of 5,449 in the 15 Public Secondary schools in Egor Local Government Area. The research instrument was a questionnaire designed by the researcher. The instrument was validated by the researcher’s supervisor, and two other lecturers in the Department of Educational Foundations, necessary corrections were made on the questionnaire before it was administered. Reliability test was also conducted for the instrument using Cronbach Alpha and it yielded a reliability co-efficient of 0.78. The research questions were answered using mean statistics while the hypotheses were tested using independent samples t-test.
The findings of this research shows that the influence of Literature-in-English has positive impact on the language proficiency and cultural awareness of secondary school students in Egor Local Government Area, Edo state. Also, there was no sex difference in students' perception of the influence of Literature-in-English on their language proficiency and cultural awareness. Based on the result of the study, it is recommended among others, that students should be encouraged to analyse literary texts, challenging them to quesion stereotypes, biases and assumptions which can lead to improving language proficiency and deeper understanding of cultural nuances and complexities.
