ABSTRACT
Educating nomadic Fulbe children have drawn a lot of attention in trying to educate all Nigerian citizens by the Nigerian government. It has always been a hotly-debated issue that "how" these children could be educated. This study "The impact of conventional and contextual English textbooks on the performance of nomadic pupils in reading comprehension of primary five (5) pupils of Soba and Sabon-gari Local government, Kaduna state (Nigeria) aimed to investigate whether teaching reading comprehension using both the contextual and conventional textbooks could be employed in teaching reading comprehension to the nomadic pupils instead of using a culture specific textbook (contextual textbook) only to the pupils. The population covered all the primary five (5) pupils of nomadic Fulbe primary school in Soba and Sabon-gari Local government, with population of two hundred and eighty five (285) pupils of 2014/2015 academic year. A sample size of 80 pupils was randomly selected from four primary schools out of the population with the aid of random table numbers (Kerlinger, 1973). Forty served as the control group and forty formed the experimental group. True experimental pre-test- post test design using experimental and control groups was used. Two research instruments were employed - the contextual and conventional passages culled from the pupils textbooks. Three research questions were asked and three hypotheses were generated. Paired sample t-test was employed to test the hypothesis at 0.05 levels of significance. The findings indicated that, there was no significant difference between those exposed to conventional and control groups based on reading comprehension performance at the literal, inferential and critical level. The study concluded that the teaching of reading comprehension to nomadic pupils using conventional and contextual textbooks would have significant impact on their reading comprehension. The study therefore, the study suggested the use of both contextual and conventional based textbooks in teaching reading comprehension in nomadic fulbe primary schools. This is expected to upgrade reading comprehension performance enhance their English language learning.