Effectiveness of modern teaching methods on students' English performance in secondary schools in Burera District, Rwanda

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of modern methods of teaching the English language on students’ performance in secondary schools within Burera district. Anchored in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, it adopts a mixed-methods approach. This study employed a descriptive survey, integrating both qualitative and quantitative approaches. A systematically selected sample of 368 respondents was drawn from 4561 individuals, including 3788 students, 424 teachers and 349 school staff from 86 secondary schools. Data were gathered through questionnaires aligned with the research questions. The quantitative data were processed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), involving editing, coding, summarising, and analysis through descriptive statistics. Qualitative data were analysed thematically and presented narratively. The findings revealed that communicative strategies such as language games, role plays, discussion, and the development of grammatical communicative competence within communicative contexts significantly enhance students’ English performance in secondary schools. Moreover, it was found that Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) enables the teachers to use poems, chants, stories, drama and games, and pictures to effectively teach English to enhance students’ performance. Based on these results, it is recommended that schools establish and sustain the effective application of communicative teaching and learning and computer-assisted language learning, which will improve students’ English fluency, proficiency and performance on the whole.