IMPACT OF TEACHERS' QUALIFICATION, GENDER AND LANGUAGE TEACHING ON STUDENTS' COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

The study investigated the impact of teachers’ qualification, gender and language teaching on students’ communicative competence in Benue State. A descriptive survey design and ex-post facto design were adopted. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. A sample of 600 SS II students and 40 language teachers. A multi stage sampling technique was adopted to select the schools. First, stratified random and hat and draw sampling techniques were used to select schools from the three Education Zones A, B and C in Benue State. Secondly, a purposive sampling was used to select 15 students each from the sampled schools, giving a total of 600 SS II students. The students were divided into three groups of 5 students in each group using randomisation. A simple random sampling was used 10 lesson plans from each language teacher making a total of 400. Two instruments used for data collection were Evaluation Checklist on Language Teachers’ Lesson Plans (ECLTLP) and Students’ Communicative Achievement Test (SCAT). ECLTLP was used to evaluate teachers’ language teaching, while SCAT was meant to test students’ communicative competence. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results revealed a significant impact of language teaching by teachers with high qualification, as well as male teachers on students’ communicative competence over their female counterpart. It was recommended that, regardless of gender and qualification, teachers should always employ the use of communicative activities while teaching in order to improve students’ communicative competence.