ABSTRACT
This study examined the effects of bottom-up and top-down reading strategies on the students' reading comprehension achievement of some JSS II students in Zaria Inspectorate Zone, in Kaduna State. The purpose was to determine the reading comprehension strategies (bottom-up or top-down) that has more effect on students' reading performance and to use the findings as basis for making useful recommendations to help direct or redirect the approach to teaching reading comprehension not only in Zaria Inspectorate Zone but the nation as a whole. The study has a total population of 6,883 students and the sample size of 120 students which were randomly drawn from three junior secondary schools across the study area. The study employed a pretest-posttest experimental design method where the performance of the three groups of subjects (bottom-up, top-down and control groups) was measured before and after the treatment. Reading comprehension achievement test was used to teach the experimental groups, while the control group was exposed to the same passages but taught traditionally. That is, the bottom-up group was treated with bottom-up reading comprehension strategies; the top-down group was treated with top-down reading comprehension strategies while the control group continued with their normal reading comprehension lessons on the school time table. After administering the pre-test, eight weeks were used for the treatment. Post-test was also administered to the three groups and the results were used to compare between the results of the bottom-up, top-down and control group. Three research questions were asked, and three hypotheses generated. These were statistically tested at 0.05 levels of significant employing t-test inferential statistics and the analysis of variance (ANOVA). The result showed that teaching reading comprehension using top-down reading comprehension strategies is relatively more effective for students' comprehension than using bottom-up to teach reading comprehension. However, the bottom-up group performed better than the control group. The study therefore, recommends that both bottom-up and top-down reading comprehension strategies should be included in the junior secondary school curriculum. Bottom-up reading strategies should be used especially when teaching vocabularies, bringing out phrases and topic sentences since it was effective on the learners' performance while top-down reading strategies should be used in teaching areas like contextual guessing and inferring meaning.