School Location as a Correlate of Senior Secondary School Students’ Achievement in Reading Comprehension in the English Language in Ebonyi State

This study considered school location as one of the correlates of Reading Comprehension achievement in senior secondary schools in Ebonyi State of Nigeria. The design adopted for this study was correlation research design. Location as a variable was correlated with students’ achievement in reading comprehension in English. Two purposes of study and two research questions were formulated to guide the study, namely: to establish the relationship between urban school students’ attitude and their reading comprehension achievement in English in Ebonyi state, and to determine the relationship between rural school students’ attitude and their reading comprehension achievement in English in Ebonyi State. Two null hypotheses were also tested. Research questions were answered using coefficient of correlation, while hypotheses were tested at an alpha level of 0.05, using step-wise linear regression. Results showed that the coefficient of correlation between urban students’ attitude and their achievement was 0.84 which falls within 0.80 – 1.00 and showed a very high positive relationship. This indicated there was a relationship between urban students’ attitude and their reading comprehension achievement. Result also showed a medium positive relationship between rural students’ attitude and their reading comprehension achievement. Based on these results, recommendations were made among which was that Government should device a policy that would encourage qualified English language teachers to accept posting to rural schools. To make this gesture attractively workable, government should give monetary incentive to these English language teachers, especially those that accept posting to rural schools.