Integrating videos in the teaching of Kiswahili proverbs in a secondary school in Kenya: An action research

Proverbs are expressions of the folk which contain wisdom, truth, morals, experiences, lessons, and advice concerning life and which have been handed down from generation to generation. Proverbs were used since the Middle Ages as pedagogical tools in the study of language with the aim to enhance educational outcomes. With increased access to a variety of technologies, teaching and learning has to be reformed to be in tandem with the times. Integration of videos in teaching Kiswahili proverbs was deemed as an attractive teaching strategy because it iS interactive therefore likely to ease learners\u27 understanding. The study of how videos could be integrated in teaching Kiswahili proverbs was carried out in a secondary school in Nakuru Municipality, Kenya. The particular emphasis was on bringing to class the context of the proverbs taught. Context removes abstractness and replaces it with a near representation of real objects and situations. This was a Participatory Action Research involving one teacher and Form2 class students in one secondary school purposively selected. Data was collected through multiple methods that included document analysis, interviews, classroom observations, reflective conversations and a focus group discussion. Data collection and analysis were concurrently done since the findings of an earlier cycle had to inform a later one. Findings from the study suggest that when videos are used to bring real contexts of proverbs to class, they ease learners\u27 understanding and are motivating because they appeal to the learners, audio, visual and kinaesthetic senses. The learners during a post-intervention focus group discussion suggested that videos attracted their concentration in the lessons because of its audio- visual nature that enabled them to engage more than one sense organ. However preparing the videos is time-consuming exercise thereby requiring that once videos have been made, they be preserved for later use in the study setting and beyond