English Language Literacy Skills and Academic Achievement of Urban and Rural Secondary Schools: The Case of High and Low Achievers

The main objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between English language literacy skills and academic achievement between urban and rural secondary schools. The study employed a descriptive design. The subjects of the study were 139 students (73 urban and 66 rural) selected from seven secondary schools in Hawassa University Technology Village local district through a stratified random sampling technique. The data were collected by administering a literacy skill test that contains reading and writing skill items. Then, a t-test was computed to compare the mean differences between rural and urban secondary school high and low achievers' English language literacy skill performances. And the p-value was computed to determine the level of significance of the obtained mean difference. The findings disclosed that there was a statistically significant mean difference between urban secondary school high achievers in the test scores of English language literacy (0.003, which is < 0.05) in which urban high achievers outperform. Likewise, regarding the subcomponents of English literacy skills, a statistically significant mean difference (0.006, which is < 0.05) was obtained between urban and rural high achievers, which favored the urban ones. On the other hand, the study also confirmed that there was no statistically significant difference between the urban and rural low achievers in their language literacy skill mean scores.