The study investigated the relative effectiveness of three methods (Action-Oriented Approach, Active and Traditional Methods) of teaching French speaking skills on Junior Secondary School Students’ Proficiency in Edo State. Six research questions were raised and six hypotheses were formulated from the research questions to guide the study. The hypotheses determined whether there was a significant difference in students’ proficiency in French language speaking between high and low level French proficiency speaking students; male and female students, and students from different school types. They also determined whether there was interaction effect of methods, gender and proficiency level among students taught French speaking skills using the Action-Oriented approach and Active method.
The population of the study comprised all the four thousand four hundred and thirteen (4,413) students in eleven (11) Junior Secondary Schools where French is offered as a subject in Edo South Senatorial District during the 2017/2018 academic session. A quasi-experimental design was employed for this study, and using both the stratified and simple random sampling procedure, a total of six hundred and eighteen (618) students constituted the sample size drawn from three sampled schools in Ikpoba-Okha, Oredo and Ovia North-East Local Government Areas. One instrument titled "Speaking Proficiency Test (SPT)" with a reliability coefficient of 0.87 was used for data collection. The data collected were tested with both descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, standard deviation, ANOVA and t-test for independent samples. All the hypotheses were tested at the .05 level of significance. The result of the data analyses led to the rejection of all the hypotheses.
Among the findings from this study is that there is a significant difference in the post-test mean scores of students in the experimental and control groups. In the two experimental groups, both high and low proficiency speakers had a noticeable progress after the treatment, with a good number of high proficiency speakers found in the Active method group. Also, the participants in the all-girls school outperformed the participants in the all-boys school who also out-performed the participants in the coeducational school. It was concluded that the Action-Oriented approach is superior to the Active method which is in turn superior to the Traditional method of teaching French speaking on Junior Secondary School Students’ Proficiency in Edo State. Consequently, it was recommended that teachers should take the teaching of French speaking skills seriously using the Action-Oriented approach as well as the Active method for enhanced French language proficiency.
