ABSTRACT

Children literature is an important aspect in children’s language performance in school and life after school. Despite its critical role, pupils are not reading enough literature books for them to master language. The purpose of this study was to analyse the teaching strategies used to teach children literature and reading competence among class seven pupils at Kasarani Sub-County, Nairobi County. The study aimed at achieving the following objectives: to analyse the teaching strategies used by teachers to teach children literature; to analyse resources used in teaching children literature; and to evaluate children’s reading comptence in literature. This research was guided by Semeotic Theory. The design of the study was descriptive survey. Simple random sampling was used to sample twelve schools in Kasarani and purposive sampling was used to select twelve Kiswahili teacher’s handling children literature in class seven. Questionnaires, interview guides, observation and document analysis were used to collect data. The collected data was edited, organized, entered into a computer and analyzed with the aid of Social Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The analysed data was presented using descriptive statististics such as tables, graphs and charts. The findings of this study indicated that silent and individual reading were the major strategies used in teaching literature in most primary schools, thus, teachers did not use variety of teaching strategies. All teachers (100%) agreed that story books and writing boardswere the major resources used in delivering children literature. The study concludes that new instructional techniques such as redio lessons, televisions, recorded videos and audios were not utilized at all. Majority of pupils, as well, did not perform well in all sections of composition.This is because the teachers did not use different strategies and new instructional techniques in their teaching to improve pupils performance. The study recommends that; teachers should use different strategies in teaching children’s literature, children should be encouraged to read more story books, and library lessons should be more than one.